Our experience
We have a team of subject specialists, each educated at least to first degree level, and covering a wide range of disciplines. We have many years’ experience of writing text alternatives for mathematical expressions, infographics and complex images, including in the context of making accessible many hundreds of maths, science and humanities exam papers.
Infographics and diagrams
We offer a stand-alone image description service for:
- infographics of all kinds, including line graphs, scatter plots, bar charts, pie charts, etc
- technical and other specialist diagrams
The limitations of tabular data
Data can, of course, be presented in tabular form. However, extracting complex information on trends, patterns, proportions, relationships or anomalies from a data table can be difficult and time-consuming (as opposed to extracting a single data value to answer a specific question, which is relatively straightforward). Scottish engineer William Playfair solved the problem, at least for sighted people, with the invention in 1786 of bar charts, line graphs and area charts (pie charts took him until 1801).
The solution for anyone who can’t see a graphic is, of course, a carefully crafted text description that includes all of the information conveyed by the image that is relevant to the context.
Mathematical expressions
Until such time that MathML is sufficiently widely accessibly supported, it will often be necessary to provide unambiguous text alternatives for mathematical expressions. For example, “the square root of 5 over 2” is ambiguous. It could mean either of the following:
(the solution to which is 1.5811),
or,
(the solution to which is 1.1180).
However, in the case of the first of the above expressions, “start square root, start fraction, 5 over 2, end fraction, end root“, is entirely unambiguous, as is “start fraction, start square root, 5, end root, over 2, end fraction” in the case of the second.