Brushing and Linking

An interactive visualization technique where selecting or highlighting data in one chart automatically highlights the corresponding data in other linked charts within a dashboard. For example, clicking a bar in a bar chart might highlight the same data points in an adjacent scatterplot. While powerful for visual data exploration, brushing and linking presents significant accessibility challenges: the interaction is often implicit and undiscoverable by screen reader users, the visual highlighting has no non-visual equivalent, and the cross-chart data changes are not communicated to assistive technologies. Making these interactions accessible requires explicitly surfacing them as filter controls and providing textual change descriptions.