Please add alt text (alternative text) to all of your posted graphics for #TidyTuesday.
Twitter provides guidelines for how to add alt text to your images.
The DataViz Society/Nightingale by way of Amy Cesal has an article on writing good alt text for plots/graphs.
Here’s a simple formula for writing alt text for data visualization:
It’s helpful for people with partial sight to know what chart type it is and gives context for understanding the rest of the visual. Example: Line graph
What data is included in the chart? The x and y axis labels may help you figure this out. Example: number of bananas sold per day in the last year
Think about why you’re including this visual. What does it show that’s meaningful. There should be a point to every visual and you should tell people what to look for. Example: the winter months have more banana sales
Don’t include this in your alt text, but it should be included somewhere in the surrounding text. People should be able to click on a link to view the source data or dig further into the visual. This provides transparency about your source and lets people explore the data. Example: Data from the USDA
Penn State has an article on writing alt text descriptions for charts and tables.
Charts, graphs and maps use visuals to convey complex images to users. But since they are images, these media provide serious accessibility issues to colorblind users and users of screen readers. See the examples on this page for details on how to make charts more accessible.
The {rtweet} package includes the ability to post tweets with alt text programatically.
Need a reminder? There are extensions that force you to remember to add Alt Text to Tweets with media.
The data this week comes from Freedom House and the United Nations by way of Arthur Cheib.
I want to note that a "Freedom Index" from any source have potential bias or miscalculations. While the index appears to cover many social issues including freedom of religion, expression, etc this data (like any data) can be approached with skepticism. Data such as this are far from perfect and may misrepresent nuanced political situations or oversimplify difficult to record/measure political nuance.
Thank you to a few users who suggested alternative resources or critiques.
Freedom in the World, Freedom House's flagship publication, is the standard-setting comparative assessment of global political rights and civil liberties. Published annually since 1972, the survey ratings and narrative reports on 195 countries and 15 related and disputed territories are used by policymakers, the media, international corporations, civic activists, and human rights defenders.
Freedom House has written about their index - notably an article in 2018 on "Democracy in Crisis" and "10 years of Decline in Global Freedom"".
# Get the Data
# Read in with tidytuesdayR package
# Install from CRAN via: install.packages("tidytuesdayR")
# This loads the readme and all the datasets for the week of interest
# Either ISO-8601 date or year/week works!
tuesdata <- tidytuesdayR::tt_load('2022-02-22')
tuesdata <- tidytuesdayR::tt_load(2022, week = 8)
freedom <- tuesdata$freedom
# Or read in the data manually
freedom <- readr::read_csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/master/data/2022/2022-02-22/freedom.csv')
| variable | class | description |
|---|---|---|
| country | character | Country Name |
| year | double | Year |
| CL | double | Civil Liberties |
| PR | double | Political rights |
| Status | character | Status (Free F, Not Free NF, Partially Free PF) |
| Region_Code | double | UN Region code |
| Region_Name | character | UN Region Name |
| is_ldc | double | Is a least developed country (binary 0/1) |