{"id":31480,"date":"2026-08-18T12:35:42","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T12:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"urn:uuid:952b6354-3130-4fa5-b606-c4068a049420"},"modified":"2026-09-01T10:18:22","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T10:18:22","slug":"introducing-audiom-for-highcharts-maps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.highcharts.com\/blog\/tutorials\/introducing-audiom-for-highcharts-maps\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing Audiom for Highcharts Maps"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Guest post by Brandon Biggs<\/strong>
CEO, XR Navigation<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brandon is CEO of XR Navigation, an official Esri partner<\/a> working in partnership with the National Federation of the Blind<\/a>.

Maps tell stories that tables cannot. A choropleth of GDP per capita or world population lets a reader see a pattern at a glance. But \u201cat a glance\u201d is exactly the barrier for blind and low-vision (BLVI) people. Highcharts<\/a> has treated accessibility as part of the product for years, from keyboard-navigable charts to screen reader support and its Accessibility module<\/a>. Maps, though, have always been the harder problem. So we teamed up with the Highcharts team to bring Audiom<\/a> directly to Highcharts Maps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The barrier with data maps<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Highcharts Maps<\/a> powers thousands of dashboards, news graphics, and analytics products around the world. Its Accessibility module already lets screen reader users move through chart data point by point. For a map, though, reading a list of regions and values leaves out the information that makes a map a map: the spatial relationships. Which countries border which. What sits north of what. How a high-value cluster presses up against a low-value one. That spatial layer, what cartographers call landmark, route, and survey knowledge, is hard to convey through a plain data table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This barrier is bigger than most developers realize. An estimated 1.6 billion people, around 20% of the world, cannot use digital maps: blind and low-vision people, keyboard-only users who navigate without a mouse, and many others. They all deserve an \u201cequivalent purpose\u201d experience, the standard set out in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.1.1<\/a>. The law increasingly agrees. In the United States, ADA Title II now requires state and local government websites and apps, including their maps, to be WCAG 2.1 AA compliant<\/a>. Delivering that for an interactive map takes purpose-built technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Audiom does<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Audiom<\/a> is our inclusive digital map viewer and editor. Currently all executives and board members of XR Navigation have a disability. A blind user can explore an Audiom map with a keyboard or a touch screen, hear each region announced with its name and value, move between neighbors, and build a mental model of the whole layout through interactive alt-text and audio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Audiom is not a lightweight add-on. It is WCAG AAA compliant with a 3rd-party Accessibility Conformance Report<\/a>, it is grounded in over 13 academic studies with hundreds of blind and sighted participants, and it was one of three recipients of the 2025 Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAADY) award<\/a>. In 2024, the National Federation of the Blind passed a resolution<\/a> calling on federal agencies and universities to adopt inclusive digital maps. We built Audiom to meet that call.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How the integration works<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Our Audiom-Highcharts plugin<\/a> does the work for you. When your Highcharts map loads, the plugin reads the map\u2019s GeoJSON and mounts an interactive Audiom experience alongside it. Your visual chart stays exactly as you designed it. Sighted and BLVI users get the same underlying data, each in the form that works for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You decide how the two experiences sit together with a single display option:<\/p>\n\n\n\n