Communicating statistics and analysis

Basecamps are online spaces with a message board where you can ask questions and share ideas. There are also areas to share documents and advertise events.

Presentation and Dissemination of Statistics and Analysis

Please email analysis.function@ons.gov.uk to ask for an invite link to be sent.

All departments should have a Government Statistical Service (GSS) presentation and web dissemination champion. These champions should be able to help you find out more about communicating statistics and analysis in your department.

Read more about the GSS presentation champion network.

Read more about the GSS dissemination champion network.

The GOV.UK Accessibility Community is a group where you can ask questions about accessibility, develop your knowledge, and get or give advice and support.

Instructions for joining the accessibility community discussion group can be found on the Accessibility Community page on GOV.UK

The team are part of, and contribute to the UK Government Digital Slack.

Useful channels for communicating analysis include: #accessiblity, #content and #design.

Transcript of video including audio description (DOC, 113KB).

We will be adding correctly edited subtitling to this video soon.

Materials from the “Making charts accessible” session delivered as part of DataConnect22. These materials include the recording, slides, plain text version of slides and question and answer session.

Download a transcript of the session on making spreadsheets accessible (ODT, 49KB).

Materials from the “Making spreadsheets accessible” session delivered as part of Analysis in Government Month 2022. These materials include the recording, transcript and useful links.

The team share their knowledge of communicating analysis and accessibility in blogs.

• Lessons learned at the “Communicating maths for the public” event
• Text descriptions for data visualisations
• Communicating using colour
• Accessibility empathy for users of spreadsheets
• What I have learnt since joining the Analysis Function Communicating Analysis team
• What we learnt from testing our data visualisation e-learning

Data visualisations

Fundamentals of Data Visualization by Claus O. Wilke – This book provides a broad range of guidance on best practice data visualisation. It includes some more complex data visualisation types which are not covered in our guidance.

Best Practices for Data Visualisation from the Royal Statistical Society – This page has lots of guidance around the fundamentals for creating data visualisations and is referenced throughout. It includes a sections on ‘Principles and elements of visualisations’ and ‘Styling charts for accessibility’.

Chartability – This website can be useful to help you do self audits of charts. It also includes links to useful examples of WCAG key principles and other research.

Accessibility

Presenting data from the ONS Service Manual – guidance for creating charts and tables to publish on the Office for National Statistics (ONS) website.

Evergreen Data – has some really good resources and an excellent blog.

Data visualisation in R or Python – The Data Science Campus

Please note it is only available to those badged to a government analytical profession.

Data Visualisation Thinking – Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)

This is a useful resource on how to approach creating data visualisations.

Please note active content within this resource has been removed.

Exploring data: graphs and numerical summaries– Open university

This is a free e-learning course that could take up to 20 hours to complete.

It gives an introduction to summarising data and provides statistical definitions and activities to practise.

Please note some equations are images so may not be visible to screen reader software.

Communicating Science and Engineering Advice – Government Science & Engineering (GSE)

This 2 hour course is available on Civil Service Learning. Module 2 – Communicating science and engineering advice provides further learning on data visualisations methods.

If you do not have access to Civil Service Learning, please complete the GSE Courses FutureLearn Sign Up form, using your work email address. The team will then send you enrolment details within three working days.

There is a wide range of support and guidance available online to help understand user needs and how we can make our content understood by as many people as possible. If you want a better understanding of access needs, you might find the following resources useful:

• Blog post on Designing for people with dyscalculia and low numeracy
• Blog post on Dos and dont’s on designing for accessibility
• Blog post on accessibility empathy for users of spreadsheets 
• Blog post on automatically produce best practice spreadsheets
• Accessibility posters from Home Office
• Experience the web as personas with access needs 

There are many tools for accessibility available. Here we have just shared a few free tools used by the team. Note you may need to ask your IT department to download this tool onto your computer.

Wave Google Chrome extension – a plug-in which allows you to do a quick accessibility check on webpages.

Hemmingway Editor – use to check reading level and hard to read sentences. Do not use with pre-release data!

WebAIMs Contrast Checker – an online tool which can tell you if colours pass or fail WCAG criterion.

WebAIMs link contrast checker – an online tool to check if colours used for hyperlinks pass or fail WCAG criterion.

NVDA – a free screen reader software you can download.

Microsoft Accessibility Checker –  Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint have a built-in accessibility checker which can be useful for spotting some common accessibility issues and providing advice on how to fix them.

We wanted to share some interesting ways to communicate analysis that we have come across for inspiration.

• Office for National Statistics’ publication on population density – check out the how population density is communicated through football pitches

We love to see examples of presenting data in different ways. If you have done something different, please share it with us so we can add it to this page. Email us at Analysis.Function@ons.gov.uk.