Dashboard Week - Day 2 - Accessibility

by Cammy Phillips

Today was day two of accessibility week. We were tasked with creating a dashboard with the vision of it being accessible to people with additional needs when interacting with a dashboard. Following is some tips to consider to make your dashboard more accessible to certain audiences.

Tips/ Considerations for people with dyscalculia

  • Dyscalculia is where an individuals struggle to comprehend numbers
  • It is easier to understand shapes and patterns that the relationship of numbers on their own
  • Use things like bar graphs and pie charts to show proportions between to measures

Tips/ Considerations for colourblind users

  • There is a large variety of different colourblindness - red-green, yellow-blue, monochromatic for example
  • Ways to help these users include: using colour that have high amounts of contrast (e.g. coolors) and are not in these pairs, double encoding colour legends to include shapes as well (e.g. in a line graph). Additionally, it is helpful to run you visulisation through colourblind tests (found online) to unsure that any use of colour is easily comprehendible

Tips/ Considerations for Keyboard Only Users

  • Older dashboards uploaded to server tab between objects in the order in which they were inserted to server (so uploading new dashboards can solve this)
  • Tooltips are not usable for keyboard only user (so any info that would be on the tooltip needed to be put on the dashboard)
  • Some of filter options don't work as there was no way of selecting options with only a keyboard, so be sure to test this out
  • Tab-ing selects as a dark blue box - this isn't always very visible if the dashboard is dark or a blue like colour so it may be helpful to change this
  • Scroll bars don't work with only a keyboard, so to look into the granularity you can use ctrl+shift+enter to bring up data tables
  • Adding instructions on keyboard commands to help a user to navigate is useful as not everyone will have the same understanding of this

This is only a small selection of possible access needs when it come to enturpreting a dashboard so to create truly universal design many more things need to be considered (e.g. is you dashboard readable via a screen reader). But these are a few good places to start.

Below is my dashboard which was build with the intention of being accessible to people with the above access needs.

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/camm7427/viz/Day2-AccessibilityandClimateChange/OverviewDashboard