Making a chart accessible: Cornell degrees awarded over time
Application exercise
Apply accessible design principles to improve the quality of a chart.
Note
This application exercise is completed in class and submitted via a worksheet.
Our goal is to make this chart depicting the percentage of degrees awarded by Cornell University over time more accessible.
Data
The data come from the Department of Education’s College Scorecard and has been structured as one row per field of study per year.
# A tibble: 145 × 3
field_of_study year pct
<chr> <dbl> <dbl>
1 Computer 1997 0.0421
2 Computer 1998 0.0497
3 Computer 1999 0.0581
4 Computer 2000 0.0716
5 Computer 2001 0.0684
6 Computer 2002 0.0859
7 Computer 2003 0.0745
8 Computer 2004 0.0463
9 Computer 2005 0.0327
10 Computer 2006 0.032
# ℹ 135 more rowsBrainstorm improvements
Your turn: Write alternative text for the chart.
Your turn: Identify how the chart above could be improved to make it more accessible using techniques discussed in class.
Implement your improvements
Now try implementing your proposed suggestions in the code cell below.
NoteSession information
sessioninfo::session_info()─ Session info ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
setting value
version R version 4.6.1 (2026-06-24)
os macOS Golden Gate 27.0.1
system aarch64, darwin23
ui X11
language (EN)
collate en_US.UTF-8
ctype en_US.UTF-8
tz America/New_York
date 2026-10-08
pandoc 3.10 @ /Applications/Positron.app/Contents/Resources/app/quarto/bin/tools/aarch64/ (via rmarkdown)
quarto 1.11.5 @ /Applications/quarto/bin/quarto
─ Packages ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
! package * version date (UTC) lib source
P bit 4.6.0 2025-03-06 [?] RSPM
P bit64 4.8.2 2026-05-19 [?] RSPM
P cli 3.6.6 2026-04-09 [?] RSPM
P crayon 1.5.3 2024-06-20 [?] RSPM
P digest 0.6.39 2025-11-19 [?] RSPM
P dplyr * 1.2.1 2026-04-03 [?] RSPM
P evaluate 1.0.5 2025-08-27 [?] RSPM
P farver 2.1.2 2024-05-13 [?] RSPM
P fastmap 1.2.0 2024-05-15 [?] RSPM
P forcats * 1.0.1 2025-09-25 [?] RSPM
P generics 0.1.4 2025-05-09 [?] RSPM
P ggplot2 * 4.0.3 2026-04-22 [?] RSPM
P ggthemes * 7.0.0 2026-10-03 [?] RSPM
P glue 1.8.1 2026-04-17 [?] RSPM
P gtable 0.3.6 2024-10-25 [?] RSPM
P here * 1.0.2 2025-09-15 [?] RSPM
P hms 1.1.4 2025-10-17 [?] RSPM
P htmltools 0.5.9 2025-12-04 [?] RSPM
P htmlwidgets 1.6.4 2023-12-06 [?] RSPM
P jsonlite 2.0.0 2025-03-27 [?] RSPM
P knitr 1.51 2025-12-20 [?] RSPM
P labeling 0.4.3 2023-08-29 [?] RSPM
P lifecycle 1.0.5 2026-01-08 [?] RSPM
P lubridate * 1.9.5 2026-02-04 [?] RSPM
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P pillar 1.11.1 2025-09-17 [?] RSPM
P pkgconfig 2.0.3 2019-09-22 [?] RSPM
P purrr * 1.2.2 2026-04-10 [?] RSPM
P R6 2.6.1 2025-02-15 [?] RSPM
P RColorBrewer 1.1-3 2022-04-03 [?] RSPM
P readr * 2.2.0 2026-02-19 [?] RSPM
P renv 1.2.2 2026-04-16 [?] RSPM
P rlang 1.3.0 2026-07-05 [?] RSPM
P rmarkdown 2.31 2026-03-26 [?] RSPM
P rprojroot 2.1.1 2025-08-26 [?] RSPM
P S7 0.2.2 2026-04-22 [?] RSPM
P scales * 1.4.0 2025-04-24 [?] RSPM
P sessioninfo 1.2.4 2026-06-04 [?] RSPM
P stringi 1.8.9 2026-08-04 [?] RSPM
P stringr * 1.6.0 2025-11-04 [?] RSPM
P tibble * 3.3.1 2026-01-11 [?] RSPM
P tidyr * 1.3.2 2025-12-19 [?] RSPM
P tidyselect 1.2.1 2024-03-11 [?] RSPM
P tidyverse * 2.0.0 2023-02-22 [?] RSPM
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P tzdb 0.5.0 2025-03-15 [?] RSPM
P utf8 1.2.6 2025-06-08 [?] RSPM
P vctrs 0.7.3 2026-04-11 [?] RSPM
P vroom 1.7.1 2026-03-31 [?] RSPM
P withr 3.0.3 2026-06-19 [?] RSPM
P xfun 0.60 2026-07-09 [?] RSPM
P yaml 2.3.12 2025-12-10 [?] RSPM
[1] /Users/bcs88/Projects/info-3312/course-site/renv/library/macos/R-4.6/aarch64-apple-darwin23
[2] /Users/bcs88/Library/Caches/org.R-project.R/R/renv/sandbox/macos/R-4.6/aarch64-apple-darwin23/46003b10
* ── Packages attached to the search path.
P ── Loaded and on-disk path mismatch.
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