11 Appropriate Map Presentation Depends On Data Resol

I have been working on a site which displays healthcare technology grants and projects in the United States. I have argued with the business owner that unless someone needs to determine driving directions between points – or query data within a region – using a high resolution map, which can zoom past the state level just isn’t necessary.

For some – perhaps most map applications, too much data is in the presentation.

However, there is another side to this dirty edged sword. To manage the data points, one needs a common denominator to work with. Geocodes are the most efficient and there are tools (Yahoo has one) to input an address and get back a Geocode. Now the problem is that the resolution of the data is extremely rich – very precise GPS positioning, several decimal points of latitude/longitude. How does that scale into a 900px x 500px image?

The answer is not very well.

While working on a more dynamic, data driven site – here is a solution I came up with. It employs the all famous styleswitcher to give the viewer a choice between viewing the data points – <li>‘s – on a map or in a hierarchical list.

http://www.hitdashboard.com/unitedStates.aspx

posted at 01:27 pm on April 18, 2006 by Kevin Barnett

12 problems

Has anyone else had a problem with this in Firefox and Safari?
The tool tip loads fine for the first item but no others.
But it works find in IE.

posted at 03:20 pm on April 18, 2006 by M C

13 Found something annoying

if you have any sort of whitespace or tab between the opening <dt> and opening <a> it will not work in firefox/mac.

I prefer to say
<dt> [url=”“]link text[/url]
</dt>

so of course I’ve had a headache for the last 2 hours

posted at 04:43 pm on April 18, 2006 by M C

15 geo microformat

Have you considered looking at the geo microformat? (http://microformats.org/wiki/geo)

I’d built a maps wrapper around it, described here: http://bluesmoon.blogspot.com/2006/01/of-microformats-and-geocoding.html

It’s one way of doing accessible maps.

posted at 07:11 pm on April 18, 2006 by Philip Tellis

16 But it's not what they want to see

Seth’s maps are interesting, imaginative and thought-provoking, but risk being ignored because they do not remotely satisfy the needs of visually unimpaired users of Google maps etc. One of the main uses of on-line maps is to ‘navigate’, not to discover the population and see a snapshot of the city that English speakers have always called (and continue to call) Bombay. And make no mistake, people do want to scroll and zoom, which is why the Ajax-powered rapidly-responding Google/ViaMichellin maps are so popular by comparison with the old world-wide-wait Multimaps.

I think there are two questions that should be asked:
1. Do visually-impaired people want to be able to obtain geographical navigational information of the sort provided by Google etc maps?
2. If so, can such accessible information be incorporated into the Google/ViaMichellin type of thing or is some other alternative more practical and appropriate?

posted at 07:29 pm on April 18, 2006 by David Leader

17 Giving the big boys a nudge

I agree with what David has said above: that the consumers of Google/Yahoo maps are going to be more interested in navigating, scrolling, zooming etc, and less interested in pulling up little bits of data about the city.

At the same time, I think that once people begin proving out these sorts of concepts, and showing that maps can be made accessible whilst providing the levels of interactivity available in the popular API’s, then the excuse that accessibility had to be relegated to the back row to allow innovation becomes a moot point.

I think this article is an important first step, and would be interested in seeing some follows ups that start pushing it to the levels of flexibility that comes from the major API’s.

posted at 11:59 pm on April 18, 2006 by Ben Ryan

18 Bug

In the third example: http://www.alistapart.com/d/cssmaps/on-example/index.html

If I click one of those cities, and then return from Wikipedia to that map, there is no way to switch off the tooltip about the city, short of refreshing the page.

It compounds as more cities are clicked and the back button used. This wasin Firefox 1.5/Windows.

posted at 12:05 am on April 19, 2006 by Ben Ryan

19 Maps are visual

There is no denying it: text-based content can, if structured properly, be equally accessible to both the 20/20-vision general public, and to the visually impaired; but maps and other purely visual data cannot. I find the example in this article rather unrealistic (in agreement with comment 16 above): why would a visually impaired person go to a map site, to find out the population of Tokyo? Because that’s about the limit of what they can access in this example, and if they wanted to know that, they’d just go straight to Wikipedia.

This article brings to light the possibilities of truly accessible maps, but I don’t think that the example in the article is such a map. A truly accessible map would provide the meaningful and contextual geographic information (the essence of the map) to all users: e.g. the latitude and longitude of each city, the distance and direction of the 10 nearest cities, nearby seas and mountains, etc. The real question is: if enough of the right text-based content is put into a map, can it be a real substitute for the full visual experience? The only way to know would be to attempt building such a map.

PS: all this is reminding me of MUDs (Multi User Dungeons – text-based multiplayer games), which are able to convey contextual geographic information through a text console. E.g.: “to your north is a city, to your south lies the ocean”, etc. Perhaps web-based maps could learn something from this?

posted at 04:38 am on April 19, 2006 by Jeremy Epstein

20

There’s no denying that this is more accessible than most, and I think that’s a brilliant place for us all to start. I’m not convinced this method would carry over well to large applications, but for small sites I’ll certainly be using Seth’s technique in the future – thanks!

On a side note:

PS: all this is reminding me of MUDs … which are able to convey contextual geographic information through a text console. E.g.: “to your north is a city, to your south lies the oceanâ€?

This makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Let’s get started!

posted at 07:16 am on April 19, 2006 by Rob Swan