This is our last week of DS training and with that comes our first day of Dashboard Week. To start the day, we were taken through a 2 hour class on accessibility with data visualisations. We covered a wide variety of areas but mainly focused on Neurodivergence, Visual Impairments, and Hearing Impairments.
This session really opened my eyes in terms of what someone may need in a visualisation in order for it to be used to it's full potential.
The task following this session was we were given a dashboard to re-design with a certain accessibility issue in mind. My area was someone in a sales team who was having issues using a financial reporting dashboard as they had dyscalculia.
The dashboard that was given to us had several issues:
- Too cluttered
- Too many labels on marks
- Lack of legends
- No guidance on how to use the dashboard
- Too many charts that were not relevant
- Very overwhelming
These are only a few of the many issues that were in this dashboard. From here, I went away and started planning on how I wanted to show this data with dyscalculia in mind.
Changes I made:
- Lots of padding to space out charts
- Prioritise number of charts as there were lots of junk charts that did not show relevant info.
- Bolded and increased title size alongside a brief description in the main title on what the dashboard showed and a statement on what each chart showed beneath the chart title.
--> Wanted to incentivise exploration but with some more guidance.
- Changed values from X,XXX,XXX to X.X million
—> Easier to digest shorter numbers
- Moved the KPIs to the top of the screen to show the overarching numbers in a more centralised area.
- Reduced labels on charts and only showed the most recent values.
- Emphasised colours to highlight key trends
--> Bringing focus to the trends rather than the numbers at first.
Overall, the way I found to help this person with dyscalculia was to really take the key info from the original viz and make it as digest-friendly as possible to ensure successful usability and accessibility. Additionally, it was a real eye-opener to how I do not usually take into account other forms of accessibility besides colour blindness when designing my dashboards however, all forms of accessibility are just as important.