V 0.5.7 Wishlist

[BajczA475]

• Easier way to add alt text.
• Coaching to encourage doing so.
• [ ]If possible, some way to trigger auto-resizing as a function of the display window size.
• [ ]Institute a contrast check?
• Experiment with whether focus mode could add transparency as an alternative mode.
• See what it would take to create an icon array in ggplot2.
• See what it would take to create a value suppressing uncertainty palette.
• See what it would take to make a "fuzziness" visual channel.
• Consider a coaching message about error bars.
• Change from discussing luminance and saturation to discussing lightness and chroma as the former are more the physical terms and the latter are more the perceptional ones.

[BajczA475]

So, it looks like it's easy to add alt text to ggplots via labs(alt = ...). This presumably means the alt text ends up in the final plot's labels. There is also a get_alt_text() function that can be used as a shortcut to check if a graph has alt text or not. A wrapper to labs(alt = ...) seems apt, as does a coaching message that checks for and reports on a missing alt text label.

[BajczA475]

To me, it looks like the waffle package ought to make an icon array: https://r-charts.com/part-whole/waffle-chart-ggplot2/. Edit: Probably a better link: https://github.com/hrbrmstr/waffle

[BajczA475]

Here's an interesting post on VSUP with relevant code: http://lenkiefer.com/2018/05/02/what-s-up-vsup-that-s-what-s-up/. They're mapping transparency to uncertainty, but saturation might be cleaner and worth experimenting with.

[BajczA475]

Well, ChatGPT and its boundless optimism thinks a contrast-checking function would be possible, though it'd be quite hit or miss. https://chatgpt.com/share/6a8c983d-a7f4-83e9-a656-71709ab33c54. Something to maybe revisit in a later issue.

[BajczA475]

So, it terms of auto-resizing, this is indeed possible. For example, ChatGPT built this function:

.get_device_size = function(default = c(7.25, 5.95)) {

dims = tryCatch(
grDevices::dev.size("in"),
error = function(e) { c(NA_real_, NA_real_)}
)

if(length(dims) != 2 || any(!is.finite(dims))) {
dims = default
}
return(dims)
}

That would do something like that using dev.size(). It does work! But it acts based on the dimensions of the current graphics device at run time. For knitr docs and the Plots pane, that's sufficient. But for ggsave, it needs to wait until quite late in the dispatch to know what the final device dimensions will be, So, this would require a medium-complexity piping system to get intent up to that late a stage. Too much to bite off for this issue, but looks promising for future ones.

[BajczA475]

As for implementing a VSUP in R, I think that's doable...see this chat for some ideas. What it has already is pretty promising. https://chatgpt.com/share/6a8caa50-d5dc-83ea-bf9b-98326edd3941