Adding Accessibility Guide to the Website

manual/guides/accessibility_standards.md

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+---
+layout: manual
+title: Accessibility Standards
+subtitle: "Guidelines for accessible writing and figure creation."
+permalink: /manual/guides/accessibility
+---
+
+## Accessibility Standards
+
+ - Color Blindness
+ - Font Choice
+ - Screen Reader Accessibility
+ - Figure Creation
+
+This guide will provide a checklist as well as resources to 
+make your documents more accessible. 
+
+## 1. Color Blindness
+
+Before picking a friendly color palette, consider using non-color means 
+to distinguish lines or datasets, such as linestyle or markers. Matplotlib
+already has functions to do this within a plot for each dataset.
+
+For specific color guidance, avoid combinations of red, green, brown,
+and yellow for contrasting colors - as most forms of colorblindness impact
+the red and green cones of the eyes. Also, avoid only using blues or purples 
+as contrasting colors. 'Coloring for Colorbliness' is a useful [tool](https://davidmathlogic.com/colorblind/#) 
+to check color blind friendliness in your palate as well as creating good pallets
+from scratch.
+
+## 2. Font Choice
+
+Font choice relates to both the font itself and the contrast of the font 
+against the background. [WebAIM](https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/)
+is a tool to check if the contrast ratio meets the accessibility standards. Generally,
+headings should have a contrast ratio of at least 3:1, and body text should be at least
+4.5:1. If you forget, WebAIM will also tell you if the font passes.
+
+While choosing a font - consider:
+
+ - Sans Serif fonts are generally easier to read than Serif fonts
+ - Avoid thin fonts, narrow fonts, or fonts with uneven heights between lowercase and capital letters
+ - Good font examples: Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana, Helvetica
+
+Additional information and tools for font accessibility are found at
+[Section 508](https://www.section508.gov/develop/fonts-typography/),
+[ADA Site Complience](https://adasitecompliance.com/accessible-fonts/), and
+[UNC Greensboro’s Page on Fonts](https://accessibility.uncg.edu/make-content-accessible/design-elements/).
+
+## 3. Screen Reader Accessibility
+
+Make sure to use common fonts that screen readers can recognize to make your documents
+more friendly. Screen readers also often struggle with interpreting images that have no 
+metadata text. Alt text is relatively easy to add within Microsoft Word or HTML. Harvard
+has some [suggested tools](https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/auto-tools-testing#free)
+for checking webpage accessibility.
+
+However, in this group we generally use LaTeX and PDFs, and making these documents screen 
+reader-friendly is generally much harder. Some suggested LaTeX packages are accessibility, pdfcomment, 
+and axessibility - the latter being for equations.  This [journal](https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202301/rnoti-p68.pdf)
+and this [page](https://libguides.lib.msu.edu/c.php?g=995742&p=8207771) have more extensive advice.
+
+Overleaf also has an 
+[extensive page](https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/An_introduction_to_tagged_PDF_files%3A_internals_and_the_challenges_of_accessibility)
+with additional advice dedicated to this topic.
+
+## 4. Figure Creation
+
+Avoid the jet (rainbow) color scheme since it's not particularly accessible, and there are
+better color maps for conveying information. Think about what information you’re trying to 
+convey when choosing colors. Not all color palettes are created equal. Jet, for example, is not perceptually
+uniform - i.e., colors near to each other look relatively similar, while colors far apart are distinct.
+
+With Matplotlib, you can set the style of plots for a whole script with global parameters.
+
+```python
+import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
+plt.style.use(['dark_background','presentation'])
+```
+
+These global variables can be defined in a top-level file `*.mplstyle`. Matplotlib's
+default style can be found [here](https://matplotlib.org/stable/users/explain/customizing.html#the-default-matplotlibrc-file)
+while Nathan Ryan's better style file can be found [here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lV1IJgUo_V6rs7PCg5ccO6TK2ziaOM-_/view).
+
+## 5. Additional Reading
+
+ - Zoey's Accessibility [Slideshow](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vTQ6AyYOjNiIIyojh97CZJ7v9-FwkfurTOA9E0pxQ2e5bz1xfKxZP_K3P1RA8l81d6FgFhMPjLfdiBU/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000)
+ - Nathan's Plots [Guide](https://arfc.github.io/manual/guides/plots/)
+ - [Simple Tools for Mastering Color in Scientific Figures](https://www.molecularecologist.com/2020/04/23/simple-tools-for-mastering-color-in-scientific-figures/)
+ - [Best Color Palettes for Scientific Figures and Data Visualizations](https://www.simplifiedsciencepublishing.com/resources/best-color-palettes-for-scientific-figures-and-data-visualizations)
+ - [How To Choose a Color Scheme for Your Scientific Figure](https://sites.northwestern.edu/researchcomputing/2022/05/20/how-to-choose-a-color-scheme-for-your-scientific-figure/)
+ - [Introduction to the Viridis Color Map](https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/viridis/vignettes/intro-to-viridis.html)
+ - [Why you should use Viridis and not Jet (rainbow) as a colormap](https://www.domestic-engineering.com/drafts/viridis/viridis.html)