What about animated maps? - Case in point: Newark snowplow Viz

[jqnatividad]

We just built one for Newark to visualize their snowplows during the Nov 26 snowstorm event.

http://data.ci.newark.nj.us/base/maps/snowplows.html

I then did a self-assessment using Map-Score:

Design: 5/6

• sticky-map standards: 1
• pinch & zoom on mobile: 1
• deep links: 1
• comments: 0
• time filter: 1

Data truthiness: 3/5

• different geographic roundups: 0 (N/A?)
• normalized: 0 (N/A?)
• legend: 1
• available as the original location:1 (we even used the https://github.com/BetaNYC/getDataButton)
• time of individual dots: 1

Accessibility: 3/6

• available in all significant language groups: 0
• fall-back for screen-readers: 0
• no plugin: 1
• desktop browsers: 1
• works in IOS, Android, cell, & tablet: 1
• color-blind friendly: 0 (we tried, but according to http://color-brewer2.org, there was no color-blind palette for 12 trucks for qualitative data)

For a total of 11.

I thought I'd score higher. It does bring up some issues:

• what about N/A criteria?
• I still think we need to adjust weights, not just 1 for each criterion
• animation, though not addressed by the score, will impact future accessibility criteria. We think animation for this map was not just gratuitous eye-candy, but was the primary way it communicated snow plow coverage. We even thought of shading the polygons differently based on how much snowplow coverage each neighborhood gets by changing the opacity of each polygon as each snowplow passes through, but then decided not too (animated choropleth). If we did, that would have introduced more accessibility issues.