To kick off Dashboard Week, we had a session this morning on accessibility and incorporating these ideas into Tableau so that the dashboards we create are more accessible.
Accessibility is not something we have explored in much detail so far in our training, mainly focusing on using colour-blind friendly palettes in our viz's. Today's session covered the distinction between Accessible, Inclusive and Universal design:
Accessible design
Widely used in other fields
Focused on accommodating different disabilities
Is an attribute of design
Can be measured against guidelines
Inclusive design
Relatively new
Originates with technology
Method of practice
Focuses on broader scope of human difference
Universal design
Originates in architecture
Aims for a single design which can be used by the most people, without the need for adaptation
Emphasises an end state/solution
Inclusive Design Ideas
Some quick suggestions that we learnt about include being consistent with conventions, providing choice and prioritizing content.
Following the morning session, we received a project brief where we had to remake an existing dashboard while incorporating what we had learnt about accessibility. The specific scenario that I was assigned was to redesign a messy sales performance dashboard to cater to someone with dyscalculia.
The sales performance dashboard contained over 1,000 marks spread across 5 inconsistently labelled, poorly laid-out and overstimulating charts. In addition to this were 9 KPI's with precise values in the millions that were not organised. Across the dashboard inconsistent time scales were used across charts, colours were assigned but with no visible legend, and there was no guidance whatsoever on the purpose of the dashboard or how to interact with it.
The changes we made began with filtering the data to reduce the number of marks on the screen to reduce the visual load for the user (this also meant using a consistent timescale throughout all charts). We then kept the 3 most important and relevant charts in the dashboard to reduce confusion, this also increased the space between charts and allowed the dashboard to breathe. The final change we made was to add descritptive captions to the titles of the dashboard and each charts, providing a brief overview of the purpose of the dashboard and the key insights of each chart. This benefits those who use a screen reader greatly. A piece of feedback that we received that I think is crucial for future work is to include a "last updated xx-xx-xx" timestamp on the dashboard, since we hardcoded some of our key insights so it is key that users of the dashboard are aware of up-to-date the captions are.