Making Tableau More Accessible

by David Yang

Tableau is a powerful tool with untapped potential. The ability to make data more accessible through visualization is very important. On the other hand, it is still not there on being completely accessible to everyone. There might be some physical or psychological limitations that might hamper the usage of Tableau. It is only with a universal design choice that we can consciously do to make it better for everyone. Simple graphical design choices can already open the pool of users. One simple choice that is often overlooked is color blindness. It is common to be red-green color blindness. Red and green are very common usage to display good and bad. Now there is a shift to using other colors to make it much easier to see. Orange and blue are one of the choices to be color-blind friendly. Another beneficial choice is the text size. This is especially useful when presenting a dashboard. They can now read the labels and charts. Going down the list are other physical limitations that can make the user experience hellish. This especially pertained to not being able to use a mouse. Using only the keyboard is very tricky to use. There are so many shortcuts combination that needs to be remembered. Additionally, sometime browsing through a page can end up being stuck in a loop. The next level is when people are completely blind. Often the solution would be a screen reader. This can help convey how the dashboard should be used. Now the instruction must be more explicit, for the screen reader to read it for the user. However, the screen reader can’t read everything. Charts are not being read. This pushes the ball back into using an excel table to be able to look at it. A screen Reader can read an excel table. Further customization can be done on the backend of Tableau. This is where you can use a text editor and edit the XML code of the dashboard. At the current moment, a lot of steps need to be taken to create these features for a more accessible dashboard.

1 mins read

Thu 29 Sep 2022

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Tue 27 Sep 2022