CHRoMA (Cultural Heritage Review of Map Accessibility)

A significant proportion of the population have difficulty distinguishing different colours – known as Colour Visual Deficiency (CVD). Although public sector guidance addresses accessibility issues for websites, mapping is considered exempt. The Ordnance Survey and Via Europa have previously addressed this issue for background mapping used on Historic Scotland websites, however their own mapping data (Canmore and PastMap websites and the Heritage Hub) need to be addressed.

In the 6 month project, USW worked with Historic Environment Scotland to formally define and document the selected colour palettes for displaying survey data against controlled terminologies. The project outputs were formal definitions of CVD friendly CMYK and RGB values stored against controlled terminologies in the Scottish Monument Type Thesaurus. The poly-hierarchical nature of the thesaurus introduces challenges for such mappings and a solution was implemented via an RDF semantic representation that leveraged skos:Collections.