Day 1 of dashboard week was centred on accessibility, which was helpful since it was fresh in my mind from the day before.
The Brief
Glasgow City Council have provided us with incident reports (e.g. Potholes) - the task at hand was to make to present the data in an accessible format for the local residents taking into consideration universal, inclusive and accessible design.
The Process
The first active choice I made w.r.t accessibility was to include only 1 universal filter (allowing users to select the region they wanted to look at). The assumption here is that local residents would want to look at incidents in their area. This was also done to reduce the amount of things a user would have to select - helping mobility. There were lots of other active choices I made but it's easier to show with a picture of the dashboard.
Beyond the one filter other choices include;
- Use of KPIs in titles so they can be read by screen
- The layout is top to bottom, left to right - so that the tab function follows a logical order
- Checking colours on coolors to improve contrast.
- Adding separate buttons to go to the sheets that cater to different accessibility levels
- And more
All in all there are lots of things that have to be considered when making accessible dashboards, a lot of which I wouldn't normally think of.
For next time
I say for next time but I plan on doing these things very soon.
- Have a look at the data tables extension to understand why the tables weren't working
- Check the colours are also greyscale friendly
- Do peer reviews for all the smaller things like readable fonts etc
Final views
Since this isn't something I do a lot I had a lot of fun and in future I would hope to have an in depth discussion with people with different accessibility levels so I can get a better understanding of how to make my dashboards more universal !!