What is data accessibility?

Low numeracy affects more than half of the adults in the UK, while an estimated 25% of people have maths learning difficulties. These can be attributed to neurodivergence, including conditions such as dyscalculia or dyslexia, or external factors such as a traumatic school experience. About 1 in 20 people have dyscalculia in the UK, and about 1 in 17 have dyslexia.

Many live with the limitations of not understanding numbers and the impact that has on everyday life, like managing money, arranging appointments, doing calculations and telling the time.

Conditions that specifically relate to data include:

• dyscalculia
• low numeracy
• low data literacy

Therefore, we need to deliver services which convey numbers plainly and in a way that is easy for everyone to understand.

Source - accessibility and numbers

Accessible Numbers
Designing for people with dyscalculia and low numeracy

Best practice for data accessibility

This link to the NHSBSA Content Design Standards will be updated once the relevant content is available in the playbook.

The content design standards state how we should be presenting data. To help our users, try to:

• get rid of decimal places unless it’s money by rounding to a scale relative to the use of a number - for example, 10,234,357 may be more useful to be presented to some users as 10 million on a chart or “just over 10 million” in text
• leave lots of space, so that numbers do not jump around so much on the screen for people with dyscalculia
• involve people who struggle with numbers in the design process, from both within and outside the design team
• explain charts and the data involved (initially and throughout), including access to calculations involved, to increase data literacy
• simplify visualisations and data so it is suitable for all users
• highlight important aspects and key messages by pulling focus
• put things into perspective using data visualisation principles
• remove jargon, simplifying language
• use a suitable font size- the body of printed text should be size 12px (Source - Accessible print publications)
• use Frutiger as the font throughout the report – it is the recommended NHS font, with Arial being the alternative if it is not available (Source - NHS Identity guidelines)
• always follow the appropriate hierarchy of titles in a page, as this helps users of a screen reader navigate content quickly and easily

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