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Frank ⌁ Profile picture
Frank ⌁
@FrankElavsky
📊 data interaction, visualization, accessibility tools+systems @cmuhcii | disabled++ | making a ttrpg | breaking rules | ⚑ anti-fascist, anarchist |
Nov 3, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
So IDEO largely built its marketing around the idea that The Designer is a higher-level thinker who can sift through all of the mass-produced junk that was rising up as a result of automation and find quality.

This was rooted in racism and was doomed to fail... (thread) The idea here is that the Designer is above mass-produced, mindlessly engineered crap.

And this idea came about historically at a time when China, Japan, and Korea (in particular) were rising powers in manufacturing and engineering.

This is a racist framing.
Apr 28, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I saw some amazing talks and met some amazing people at #CHI2023.

I want to thank everyone who was masked: it made it easy to find folks who really care about disability.

And I can confidently say I made some really wonderful friends, finally connecting with so many of you! It was very funny to hear the exact phrase "Frank from Twitter" so many times!

And while I have loved remote work (seriously, my physical health completely changed for the better when the pandemic started), meeting folks in person has actually been wonderful.
Apr 28, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Oh wow, I missed this but remember that thread of mine about the award-winning finger rover paper?

They've done a solid job discussing what lessons they learned and even provide resources for new researchers. This is a great outcome!

adildsw.github.io/#/projects/fin… I think that folks like @AnhongGuo and others stepping in to provide more feedback, support, and help is key.

And while I hope that @adildsw not only continues to do work, I also hope that the community can do a better job supporting students new to accessibility work too.
Apr 27, 2023 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
👋🏻 Hello #a11y folks, but especially those who build software and games: I have a new piece out where I talk about "Option-Driven Design" and how it is not only a huge trend in accessibility, but surprisingly underdiscussed.

PDF here (HTML incoming):

arxiv.org/abs/2304.08748 If websites aren't accessible by default, should they use an overlay to give users options?

How do you design for conflicting access needs and access friction?

Does the amount of time someone spends with the software matter?

Do extensions and mods count?

I cover all this!
Apr 5, 2023 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Okay, I want to be as gentle as possible with a review of this now-award-winning work but there are some serious problems we need to make sure we don't repeat.

Our technical HCI class yesterday *just* talked about @elizejackson's "disability dongle" and problematic access work. Again, I don't want to destroy or attack these researchers! But I definitely want our field to know that there are some things in this paper and project that should have been caught by an accessibility committee and considered in the review process. We can do better.
Apr 4, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Hey folks, I'm joining some amazing people to talk about accessible research and publication hosted by @arxiv this April 17th!

We just passed over 1500 registered attendees! If you have any interest in this at all, please consider attending.

accessibility2023.arxiv.org/index.html Absolutely amazing folks will be there, including my past collaborators and friends @lnadolskis and @clb5590 as well as legends in this space like Godfrey, Kasdorf, and more.
Feb 13, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
A lot of misinformation is out there, stirring up anxiety. And then most major news is just the same corporate bullshit on repeat.

As someone in Pittsburgh, I've heard virtually nothing useful, actionable, or reasonable about the chemical disaster 50 mi away. What a mess. How are everyday people expected to wade through all the bad info out there and then figure out how to take action in a meaningful way?
Jan 3, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Every time I get a couple weeks off I very seriously consider just quitting full time work and writing for half the year every year for the rest of my life. I've known what I have wanted to do with my life since I was 12. The only problem is that it just doesn't make money (and I don't want it to).

I've spent only a small portion of the last 2 decades actually doing the thing I truly, selfishly love doing. Sometimes that gets to me.
Jul 7, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
What a great example of what it is like to design a chart from the ground up while considering visual accessibility.

I love the exploratory path they took to come up with something really great. I'd love to see more of this and less "chart picker" mentalities in our work. There is some solid wrestling with contrast ratios in here too - which is not something that will ever go away in our work (at least as long as we continue to encode values to colors, which is probably forever).
Jul 7, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Perfectionism is almost always reactionary. The incrementalist vision of perfection is also reactionary. The pursuit of perfection is incompatible with liberation.

We need more imperfect art, imperfect visualization, imperfect stories, imperfect goals, and imperfect action. I have been stewing for months on this piece by Julio Garcia Espinosa, "For an imperfect cinema" (1969):
ejumpcut.org/archive/online…
May 31, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
If you don't trust AI/ML to automatically generate useful charts from your data, you also shouldn't trust AI/ML to produce meaningful descriptions or alt text either.

Machines are not meant to "solve" disability and inclusion problems. People with disabilities shouldn't have to live under the algorithm.

Who we envision living in reliance on AI and our AI solutions is a significant question about our humanity and human rights. Triangle hierarchy diagram. New hierarchies of technological
May 29, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Finally wrote a script to automatically export the new version of Chartability's workbook into an MS Word document and it is 72 pages (with ample spacing used to help folks paste screenshots and write while auditing).

What a doc! I've had audits get to 200+ pages before, so hopefully the spacing and whatnot is more helpful now.

Previously those 200 pages felt cramped and disorganized.
May 27, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
It's great to see alt text being tweeted about important data illustrations, but this could be better. Important info is missing!

Partial access to info isn't real access. (So many people write partial or uninformative alt text for charts and graphs too.)

My attempt: A black hand is using an ic... And the original source by @benandjerrys keeps the 115 billion but actually leaves out the point of the illustration (scooping that big budget into other bowls):

benjerry.com/home/whats-new… Alt text screenshot that re...
May 13, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
This might sound totally fuckin weird but writing code literally helps my mental health. I'm depressed? I either need:
- Sleep (75%)
- Water (15%)
- Code (10%)

Like, going months without a machine that gives me instant feedback on the progress of my work was actually hard. Some work is really challenging because you don't know your progress or the outcome (like math) until you work all the way through it.

Programming took me from neutral about math to loving it. I wish I had started programming at a much younger age, rather than in my 20s.
Apr 22, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
There is something that I love about little games with built-in optimization problems to solve.

Every now and then I run into a game like this, obsess for a while, get a score I am happy with, and then stop. (It's best when I make up my own goalpost too, not a game-given thing.) Another time:

Apr 8, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Oh this brings me immense joy! Long before I was in data visualization, I was obsessed with the power I discovered in organizing sessions when we would start to map ourselves in a space.

Mapping became a way to see how strong we are becoming. This is so powerful for solidarity. Mapping yourselves, literally just your community and where you inhabit that community, changed how I thought about US inhabiting a space.

To step back and read your world from a distant lens, but see that reading as "us, together" is just so life-giving.
Apr 4, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I'm waiting for the renaissance of data visualization maximalism.

I want the most gorgeous, bespoke visuals you've ever seen. Intricate stories that invite you to read slowly and savor them. Visuals so dense you can revisit them for new information each time. Some brave enough to venture into maximalism (they may not describe themselves that way) are like @giorgialupi or @Altiziana.

I know a lot of scientific illustrators really make fantastic and dense figures. Perhaps @ChristiansenJen knows more?
Mar 28, 2022 • 17 tweets • 5 min read
Okay, in line with my recent goal to tweet more about accessibility wins in data visualization, here is a short thread of some awesome work going on recently.

I've chosen one project specifically by @DataSF.

Hopefully this can be an inspiration for y'all starting your journey. The project is an effort to make Covid-19 data easily accessible to the public, not just in the general term of "access" but also specifically accessible for people with disabilities.

Mar 28, 2022 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
Yeah, when examined honestly visualization is often about creating your desired change in people.

If statements like these seem a bit creepy, perhaps you'll enjoy this thread of mine:

(Incoming thread about capitalist and military roots of visualization and visual management) The rhetoric of visualization is mostly framed as a way to influence outcomes in a receiving audience.

The attentional science angle is, in many ways, a vision of management: predicting/controlling attention in order to produce ideal outcomes.

These two are tightly bound.
Mar 27, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Bringing knowledge into the world through critical methods while also insisting on being kind is easier than it sounds.

But being "nice" might be antithetical to critical practice. Along the same lines, making-while-critical is easier than it sounds, but making optimistically while remaining critical is quite hard.
Mar 25, 2022 • 25 tweets • 8 min read
Hi. I'm here to be annoying (hyper-pessimistic).

Announcing a new visualization, fresh for you:
"Facing the Scale of Digital Inaccessibility"

(incoming mega-thread on just how bad the state of accessibility work is!)

Please at least just spend some time with this graphic: Facing the Scale of Digital... My opening point:
97% of the top 1m sites auto-fail accessibility tests.

Does that seem bad? It is!

Can we be hopeful about the fact that 97% used to be 98%?

Probably not!

Automated tests have limits. And guess what? So does WCAG.