I have a pdf report created within Jaspersoft studio and the biggest issue I am having is making it both 508 accessible via screen readers and colors of each series.
I've been told I need to make the bars have different patterns for each series but I am not sure how to do that in Jasper, all I have been seeing is a way to change the solid color of each bar.
Then I know there are tags for tables in jasper to make it readable to a screen reader, is there something similar for charts or is alt-text the only way?
Thanks
Accessible graphs for screen reader users is a huge challenge. Making a graph readable for a color deficient user is a bit easier. As you mentioned, patterns are typically used (although I'm not familiar with jasper so I can't comment on how to implement patterns, sorry). If you have a color graph, try viewing it in gray scale to see how the contrast between data series looks (print on a black and white printer). That's typically why you'd want patterns.
One of the new WCAG 2.1 guidelines talks about how adjacent graphical elements (such as two bars next to each other) should have a minimum contrast ratio of 3:1. See success criteria 2.4.1 - Non-text Contrast. So if you had a light blue bar and a dark blue bar, it might be ok, although patterns are the best bet.
(If you have the rgb values for the colors of your bars, you can use a color contrast checker such as https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ to see if you have a sufficient 3:1 ratio)
I'm not aware of a way to make a graph accessible in pdf. If you had an alt attribute, it would have to be very lengthy to accurately describe the graph.
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At work we have a small external consultancy which don't appear to have much UX/usability experience. For example, their primary approach so far to responsive design has been to have a mobile breakpoint for font sizes (usually expressed in px, to boot) for heading tags, and nothing else. Even text scaling is a foreign concept to them.
We are going to release a new forms system, and they've submitted mockups of what they envision for the form look and feel. Besides the obviously faulty approaches of using placeholder text as labels, floating the label above the form when a user clicks in it, etc., their least poor mockup has each field with the label floated to appear above and inside the field boundary.
With this approach, padding is used to slide the actually enterable portion of the field down. The field boundary in this particular case is a non-gray color and with rounded corners as well. The net visual impact is of a visual bounded region with no visible field inside of it, and a label inside the top.
For dropdowns, there is however at least a visual cue that there's a field there: the down arrow. Still, where a user would expect to see field boundaries, there are none.
I'm a little concerned at this and not sure how to raise my concerns. A/B testing of this before a full release isn't possible currently, or I'd go there. Politically, my boss's boss loves these consultants, so it'd be dicey to simply express concerns without something to back them up.
I see a lot of studies and blogging about rounded vs. square corners, with studies showing that rounded corners can be more inviting and square corners draw more attention. But here, the concern I have over rounded corners is that, without any other visual cue that "here is a field", the rounded corners and the label inside and at the top directly communicates, "This is NOT a field but an empty region". Is there research or other support for this?
I am doing a mind map drawing on visio and I have used the auto arrange feature. This has caused the drawing to go over the stipulated page size (A3) into so many other pages. How do I bring the entire drawing back to A3 size without distorting the flow of the diagram.
I have attached a picture for a better description: screen shot of visio diagram
It looks like you've got a newer version then me, but in Visio 2007 at least, on the File menu you can go to Page Setup. In the Print zoom settings, there're options to "fit to [x] sheets across by [y] sheets down". Setting this to 1 x 1 might do what you want, but it'll just scale it all so you might end up with rather small text!
I am following the source quickstart tutorial. I have followed the tutorial all the way through, and am having trouble displaying the earthquake data (red circles) above the land vectors.
According to the symbol drawing order documentation:
“Higher” layers obscure “lower” ones.
However I'm not finding this to be the case. Please see attached screenshot:
The 'earthquakes' layer is the 'higher' layer, I think. I am using the 'Comic!' base map styles. Since the road lines also appear to 'mask off' the land vectors and show the earthquake data below, I'm wondering if this is causing the issue, but looking through the styles there's nothing obvious I can see.
Thanks for any help.
The documentation is correct, however the comp-op family of CartoCSS properties affect how the colors of different layers interact with each other. In this case, the marker-comp-op: screen from the quickstart example was designed to work well over a darker satellite background, but becomes nearly invisible over solid white.
If you remove the marker-comp-op property or change it to a different compositing operation such as multiply the earthquake markers should show up fine.
Any ideas why this page: http://mpdteam.net/projects.html is flashing when it scrolls? I've determined it's due to the background of the main content container, but why? is it a eye-trick, an image flaw, a browser flaw, or a code flaw? The code is easily viewable with view source or dev tools.
Let me know if you need anymore info. thanks.
(also, feel free to re-tag. i'm having a mind-blank for good tags)
It's because it uses finely spaced grey and white lines.
It is perhaps an example of the Moiré pattern, although this is more typically reserved for two overlapping grids at different angles.
I always assumed on a PC this occurred because of the redraw time between the two colours, and how finely spaced the lines are. The lines not perfectly aligning with pixels (e.g. anti-aliasing) would further enhance the flickering effect.
To fix it, try changing the size of the bands (e.g. try zooming out or in on the current page, and moving the browser, and note how you get reduced and even none of the described flickering effect).
Alternatively, you may want to apply a blur such that the difference between bands was softened (not sure if this would necessarily help).
Another suggestion that research yields is that it is due to background redrawing/scaling. However, a fixed background (as compared to a repeating one) isn't particularly applicable to your page.
In any case, for an in-depth discussion of some of the concepts involved, check out this awesome page (http://www.techmind.org/lcd/)
This might be trivial for some of you, but I have two screenshots from the Lose It! app in which I'm curious how two different screens were put together.
The first:
That middle graph which shows the statistics chart. Is that a custom image being drawn on top of with Core Graphics / Quartz to achieve the desired numbers? Is the yellow line that's being dynamically allocated all the work of Quartz?
And second:
This one might be a bit easier, but the whole bar which looks like a native UIKit widget, which contains [Budget, Food, Exercise, Net, Under]. There appears to be a drop shadow above it. Are they doing a drop shadow on the UINavigationBar? Is the menu below it just a UIImage that a designer was able to craft to look like the UINavigationBar?
If there's a blog out there which teaches UI tricks such as these, I'd love to read more.
1) Yes, it's likely a view that uses the chart as a background and then uses core graphics to render the line,
2) This could be a single view divided into four sections. Each section has two lines of text drawn with different colors. It's possible that each section may be a view that encapsulates this behavior.
I'm not aware of any blog that teaches these "tricks". It's really a case of understanding what functionality is available and then using it creatively to develop your UI.
For example we know it's possible to;
Draw images at different sizes/positions.
Draw text in different fonts, sizes, colors, alignment
Draw primitives
Really, when you have those you can create pretty much anything.
I think there's an SDK sample that demonstrates using custom views to create a fancy timezone style applications. That might be one worth checking out.
Update: found it, it's here.