Dashboard week is here and today we were looking at making dashboards to meet certain accessibility requirements.
I was tasked with improving a dashboard to be more accessible to someone with fine motor impairment. This means that they cannot use a mouse and need to be able to navigate through the dashboard using a keyboard.
With this particular dashboard, the main problems we had were:
- The focus order was random (what this means is that when the user presses tab, the dashboard item that is highlighted is completely random which can make navigation difficult).
- Tooltips contained information the user cannot access.
- The filters had apply buttons (making it more difficult for the user to change filters).
- Worksheet borders (meant that it was difficult for the user to see which dashboard items were being highlighted).
- There were a lot of filters (so if the user wanted to switch to the default view it would take them a long time to do so).
The solutions:
- Duplicate the worksheet to reset the focus order (this is a quick fix, with more time I would have learnt to manually set this using XML).
- Replace the information on the tooltips with a table extension.
- Remove the apply buttons from the filters.
- Remove the borders from each of the worksheets.
- Create a reset filters button (to see how to do this, see my blog post here).
Some extra accessibility features added outside of the scope:
- New colour palette (to take into account colour blindness).
- Added labels to bars to make the values easier to see.