After over a year of development, we’re ready to let our accessible chart library take some tentative baby steps out into the real world.
Fizz Charts is a new charting library, written in SVG and JavaScript, that is built from the ground up to be accessible by default to people using screen readers. You don’t need to activate some special “accessible output” mode. You don’t need to struggle with how to make it accessible.
It’s accessible out of the box.
We did interviews with potential clients and with native users of screen readers to determine the minimum viable product that would make our charts accessible. This is not our final vision, but it’s a stepping stone that is better than most charting libraries out there.
We only support a minimal set of the most common chart types: line charts, bar charts, pie charts, donut charts, and area charts. We support single-series and multi-series data sets.
To use Fizz Charts, you just send it your data (in JSON format; CSV and other formats coming soon) and a settings file that specifies the chart type, labels, colors, and so on, and the library takes care of the rest. You can use the default styles, or override them with your own CSS.
In the future, we have much more exciting plans. We want to support a much wider set of charts, more rendering options, and other obvious enhancements. But we also want to expand the interactivity and exploration to an unprecedented degree.
We’re not yet ready to sell Fizz Charts on the general market. Not because it’s not good, but because it’s not yet great. We want to find a small set of customers who are passionate about accessibility, and who can prioritize it enough to give us the feedback we need to improve the experience for people with disabilities. If you care deeply about inclusion and accessibility, and want to take part in our alpha program, contact us at alpha@fizz.studio.