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🧵Okay let's do some BTS for Axios' elections #dataviz. 1/5: We used <canvas> for our big maps, which means we had to do some tricks with color hashes to get interactivity. What the reader sees vs. what the computer sees. Details on how it works: observablehq.com/@camargo/can...

Jacque Schrag@jacqueschrag.com

With so much election #dataviz to choose from, pretty pleased to have the map I worked on for Axios included. Thinking about sharing some behind-the-scenes look at what we did, so stay tuned for that.

2/🧵 #a11y with #dataviz is hard, and I won't claim that we got it 100% right. But I do think we made good choices: - Used aria or sr-only text for describing the graphics - All information available in accessible tables, with skip links to them - For bigger tables, we included a search option

3/🧵 Last year I built a component library in #svelte for Axios' visuals because nobody likes building the same things over and over again. We expanded it to include election #dataviz & it made it so much easier to have consistency across multiple codebases and implementations of these graphics.

And, if you do, how? :) I’m also curious about the workflow. There’s a big repo template and you use something like the use this template GitHub feature?

We have repo templates, but actually have a shell script we run in our terminals that makes a copy of our chosen template and uses the degit package to clone it, along with a few other Axios specific set up things. S/O to my colleague @jaredwhalen.com for setting up the system for us.

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Reuters Graphics folks have some similar tooling that we used for starting templates, and they've made the scaffolding CLI tool public. It is a neat way to write templating configs that do whatever you need to, while keeping the main source of truth a GitHub repo. github.com/reuters-grap...

github.comGitHub - reuters-graphics/bluprint: Dead-easy application scaffolding and CLI.Dead-easy application scaffolding and CLI. Contribute to reuters-graphics/bluprint development by creating an account on GitHub.

Yes!! Love all the work you all do and appreciate that it's public (I'm hoping to eventually get ours to be). I often joke that we're all just reinventing the same processes/templates in our own special way, but it is genuinely cool to see the different approaches.

Yes I feel the same! But honestly, I love looking at all of it. There's so much to learn and mix-and-match! More in the open the better :) I interned with them during college and even though it was for a short time, I learnt a lot and keep using some of these open tools even now haha.

I knew this one from the folks at Reuters. Well, I'll try to take some time to think about what might actually work for our big data team of two 😂. I might do some write-up about the process.