DataViz on Simple Enough Blog

Making Your Charts Accessible to Everyone

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 03:00:00 +0200

You spend an hour polishing a chart, it’s perfect on your screen… and yet part of your readers won’t understand a thing. Your colorblind colleague can’t tell your two lines apart. The black-and-white printout flattens all your colors. The reader on mobile, in full sunlight, sees only a gray blur. As for the screen-reader user, they hear a single word: “image.” Making a chart accessible isn’t about ticking a regulatory box: it’s about keeping all your work from getting lost along the way.

7 Common Mistakes in Data Visualization

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 13:00:00 +0200

A chart is meant to clarify an idea. Poorly designed, it does the opposite: it confuses, or worse, it misleads — sometimes with no bad intent at all. The good news is that most failures come from the same handful of mistakes, easy to spot and fix. Here are seven, from the most misleading to the most subtle, with the remedy for each.

I. The truncated axis that exaggerates everything

The problem: starting the vertical axis somewhere other than zero. A 2% difference can then look like a dramatic gap. It’s the most misleading mistake — and the most common in “loaded” charts.

10 Free Tools to Create Charts Online

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0200

You know which chart you want — now you just have to produce it. Good news: there’s a wealth of free sites to create a clean visualization without installing anything, and without writing a line of code. Here’s a selection of 10 tools, ordered from simplest to most advanced, with what each does best and the limits worth knowing.

I. Before choosing a tool: choose the chart

An essential reminder: the tool doesn’t make the right chart, you do. Before opening any of these sites, identify your need first — compare, show change over time, a breakdown, a correlation? If it’s not clear, start with our guide “Which chart to choose for your data.” Once the type is decided, the tools below are just a matter of execution.

Which Chart to Choose for Your Data: The Complete Guide

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 11:00:00 +0200

Faced with a dataset, the same question always comes up: “which chart should I use?” We hesitate, try a pie chart, then bars, and often pick the one that “looks best” rather than the one that tells the truth. Yet the right chart depends neither on fashion nor aesthetics: it depends on the question your data must answer. This guide gives you a simple method to choose with confidence.

I. Start from the need, not the chart

The most common mistake is choosing a chart for its shape. The right approach is the opposite: start from the intent. Most visualizations answer one of these five questions: