Geovisualization

The use of interactive visual representations — choropleth maps, dot density maps, heat maps, flow maps, and related forms — to make geographic patterns, trends, and spatial relationships visible and explorable. Geovisualizations combine cartographic traditions with data-visualization techniques and are widely used in public health, urban planning, election reporting, environmental monitoring, and journalism. For accessibility, geovisualizations are particularly challenging because multiple encoded dimensions (location, area, color, boundary, adjacency) are perceived holistically by sighted users but decompose poorly into sequential screen-reader output, making alt text and data tables inadequate for pattern recognition and spatial interpretation.