Today's task was to create an accessible dashboard using London accessibility data relating to tourist attractions and the tube. I was tasked with focusing on color contrast, ensuring keyboard and screen-reader navigation, incorporating descriptive headings and alternative text, and using clear language.
We had much less time today to complete the dashboard so my output is simpler than I would've liked it to be. My initial idea was to help the user choose an attraction to visit and provide the closest station that suited their needs based on specific criteria that they chose. The main visual on this dashboard would have been a map that displays the selected attraction and surrounding stations.
However, I ran into a major issue where I could only get information for the nearest station, which limited what I could output since the rest of my plan depended on this map working. As a result, this was what my map ended up looking like:
One piece of knowledge that I can pass on, though, is that you can actually use keyboard navigation to go through the points on a map! You can do this by pressing Tab until you have the whole map selected, and then pressing Enter until a small blue box appears. From here, you can use the arrow keys to move this box to a specific point on the map and press Enter again to open the tooltip. If there are multiple points within the box, you can also use the arrow keys to switch between them.
Learning about accessibility today was truly a valuable experience, and I highly recommend looking into it early on in your analytics career to really cement those concepts. If you want to learn more about keyboard navigation specifically, I recommend Tableau's documentation and this dashboard made by Miles, a fellow consultant at The Information Lab.
Aside from that, some personal lessons I learned today were to avoid over-scoping and to ask questions as early as possible. Since I started my development later in the day, I didn't have a lot of time to pivot my project after I was unable to resolve my blocker. Next time, I'll be more mindful of both of these things.