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.