Dashboard Week- Day 1 Accessibility

First day of dashboard week, we had to design a dashboard based on accessibility guidelines. My task was to make a dashboard on UK’s COVID-19 cases that’s accessible to as many people as possible.

These are the factors that I focused on:

  • Have a clear title
  • Have a summary of the findings in the subtitle
  • Clear instructions for the user on how to use the dashboard
  • Have straightforward KPIs
  • Use Verdana font to avoid ambiguously letters (lowercase ‘L’(l) and capital ‘I’)
  • Use high contrast colour for important information
  • Use visible font sizes (min 12 for important information)
  • Double encoding with colours and shapes
  • Highlight significant points in the data and label them
  • Include chart captions for users who’d use narration
  • Include gridlines to ease estimation
  • Use headers to avoid unambiguous axes values
  • Alt text for non-text objects
  • Bold fonts to draw attention to important information
  • Simplicity so the user is not overwhelmed
  • Option to download the dashboard as PDF
  • Turn off tooltips because they need precise hovering and can’t be read out by the screen reader

Screenshot of  dashboard (cropped):

The feedback that we received for this task:

  • We should’ve made the caption darker to increase the contrast
  • We should’ve round some of the numbers

Overall, I enjoyed doing this task because we were challenged to think about how to incorporate elements allowing more accessibility while keeping in mind best practices that we’ve learned so far.

Author:
Linda Duong
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