As I sat at my desk, sipping an oat latte and contemplating the world of dashboards, I couldn't help but wonder—if a dashboard falls in a forest and no one can tab to it, does it even exist?
To kick off Dashboard Week, we were given a challenge: design (or redesign) a dashboard with accessibility in mind. My focus? Users who rely solely on a keyboard. Maybe it’s a personal preference, maybe it’s a necessity, but either way, the mouse was out, and the tab key was in.
Now, for those unfamiliar with the world of keyboard navigation, let me break it down for you. The tab key moves you forward, shift + tab takes you back, enter is your click, and escape is your get-out-of-jail-free card. Simple, right? In theory, yes. In practice, a nightmare wrapped in an interface.
My task? Redesign the company’s revenue trend tracker (which, for obvious corporate secrecy reasons, I won’t be sharing here—insert dramatic winky face). But I can take you through the generic pain points:
- Tabbing gone rogue – Ideally, filters should be the first stop on a dashboard journey, allowing users to set their preferences before diving into the data. But on this dashboard? The tabbing order was as chaotic as a British high street on Boxing Day.
- The interactive drama – Some chart types worked beautifully with keyboard navigation—bar charts let you “click” on a bar and see its value pop up. Others, like line graphs and scatter plots, were about as interactive as a Victorian portrait. So, I swapped some line graphs for bar charts or static KPIs that would dynamically change with filters, no clicking required.
- Signposting, darling – If you want a dashboard to be truly accessible, you can’t just assume people will know what to do. So, I added buttons for key actions—download the file, navigate pages—and an “info” button linking to all the necessary shortcuts. A friendly nudge, if you will.
I managed to fix the first two issues. But then came the real challenge—controlling tab order.
My first plan? XML. In theory, changing the <zone> ID numbers would allow me to control the order. The lower the number, the sooner it would be selected. But instead of tidying up the interface, this method completely removed items from my dashboard. Not exactly what I was going for.
With only four hours on the clock, I pivoted. I rebuilt the dashboard from scratch, carefully dragging items in the order I wanted them to be accessed. And it worked. On desktop. But on the server? Different story. Tableau’s server version overruled my changes like an outdated monarch refusing to abdicate. Apparently, XML was still the way forward.
Then, another curveball: if you’re using a screen reader, you can navigate filters but not interact with charts. And after scouring the depths of the internet, I came up empty on a solution. So, dear reader, if you know the magic key combo, consider this my desperate plea—help a girl out.
At the end of the day, designing for accessibility isn’t just a checkbox. It’s an ongoing conversation, a puzzle to solve. And maybe, just maybe, a little like life itself—you can plan all you want, but sometimes, you just have to pivot.