I’ve run into an accessibility issue with the Stats page that I thought was worth flagging.
I have relatively mild red-green color vision deficiency (deuteranomaly), and as I’ve started tracking more One Minute Changes, I’ve found the graph increasingly difficult to interpret.
When there are only two or three practice items on the graph, it isn’t much of a problem. But I’m currently practicing transitions between all of the chords I’ve learned, so I now have 11 different chord-change exercises being plotted at once. Each exercise is represented only by a different colored line, and several of those colors are quite difficult for me to distinguish from one another. If I’m not mistaken, even if I wasn’t tracking all of these chords, continues to carry the old score of items I practiced weeks ago, although I could be wrong about that.
There are a couple of things that make this especially difficult:
- The graph lines are fairly thin.
- Some of the colors are quite similar, particularly with red-green color vision deficiency.
- The legend identifies exercises by color alone, so there isn’t another visual cue connecting a line to its practice item.
- When multiple exercises have the same score, their lines overlap completely, which can make several exercises appear to be a single line.
- The current filter lets limit the date range, but not select particular practice items to display, which I think would be useful.
I actually ended up taking screenshots of the graph and giving them to an AI system to analyze. By looking across a longer date range (where the lines separated at earlier points) it was eventually able to trace the individual colors and work out which current scores belonged to which chord transitions.
That worked, but obviously needing image analysis just to read my own practice statistics probably isn’t the ideal accessibility solution! (not to mention many people with a similar issue may not have this idea)
A few changes could make this much easier to use:
- Allow practice items to be filtered individually. For example, let me display only Dm → D, Dm → Am, and Dm → A, rather than every One Minute Change I’ve recorded. This would also be useful for people without color-vision issues once their Practice Assistant contains a lot of items.
- Use something in addition to color to identify lines. Different line styles (solid, dashed, dotted), markers/shapes at data points, or similar cues would make the graph much more accessible.
- Provide the underlying values in a table. Even a simple date / practice item / score table underneath the graph would solve the problem completely and would also make the statistics much easier to review.
- Make the graph lines a little thicker or provide a way to highlight a particular series by selecting it in the legend.
- Potentially allow clicking a practice item in the legend to hide/show that series.
- Allow a hover feature on the graph that shows which stat a given line is representing.
This isn’t something that prevents me from using the Practice Assistant, and my color-vision deficiency is fairly mild. That’s actually why I thought it was worth mentioning: if I’m having significant trouble distinguishing the series, I imagine someone with stronger color blindness could find the graph effectively unreadable once enough practice items accumulate.
Otherwise I’ve been finding the Practice Assistant very useful, especially as I’ve started deliberately slowing my One Minute Changes down and tracking clean chord changes rather than just maximum speed. I’d just love to have a way to actually inspect those trends without relying almost entirely on color.
I realize some of these suggestions may be easier to implement than others (I’m a web developer myself), and I don’t mean to suggest that every one is necessary before the page is useful. I wanted to offer several possibilities because each would reduce the current dependence on color in a different way. Even implementing one of them would make the statistics easier to use for people with color-vision deficiencies, while also improving the page for everyone once a larger number of practice items are being tracked.