Dashboard Week: Day 1 - Accessibility

To start off this dashboard week we are learning all about accessibility and what it means to make a dashboard accessible for all users. What this means is creating dashboards that promote inclusivity and ensure that everyone, regardless of their abilities, can benefit from the insights and information being presented on a dashboard. There are many ways to make a dashboard more accessible, so here are select few that can do just that:

Choose Accessible Fonts and Colors

It’s important to choose colors that are distinguishable for all users. For example, using color palettes that cater to those with color blindness or low vision. Using color combinations such as red and green can make it difficult for users with vision impairments to truly understand a dashboard. This also applies to selecting a font – it’s important to carefully choose colors and fonts that make a dashboard fully legible.

Provide Alternative Text for Images

When creating a dashboard, we often add images to help amplify the insights we want to show the world. However, these images cannot be easily digestible with users with visual impairments who rely on screen readers to understand the content being shown. By adding alt text, or alternative text, to images, you can add a text description to all of your visual elements so that screen readers can easily communicate the information to the end user.

Descriptive Titles, Labels, and Captions

While on the topic of screen readers, there are a few elements in a dashboard (other than images) that a screen reader cannot read, such as tooltips, axis labels or titles, headers, and anything else that is within the chart area (including tables). Thus, it is important to use titles, labels, and captions, to convey all the insights you want your end-user to receive. This element is also important for users that don’t have a visual impairment because it helps guide viewers through your logic and insights.

Practice Using the Dashboard with Assistive Technologies

You’ve finished creating your dashboard, now it’s time to see if it’s accessible to all users. It’s important to test your dashboard using assistive technologies such as screen readers, magnifiers, keyboard navigation, etc., to make sure that all of your dashboard is accessible and can be easily navigated. This is a good practice to maintain because it allows you to see the barriers that may exist for users with disabilities and it can show you how to modify and finalize a product so that it is fully accessible.

These 4 points all boil down to two major questions that you should always ask yourself when creating a dashboard – Who’s going to view this dashboard? And where is it going to be accessed from? Using these two questions as a foundation for your dashboard creation will allow you to create dashboards with the intention of making it accessible.

For more information for how to create web content more accessible visit: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/

Author:
Nayeli Jaime
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