Dashboard Week, Day 1: Fix My Street (Glasgow)

Day 1 of Dashboard Week for me was a few months ago (May 30), but I had to leave early that day, so I didn’t get to complete that dashboard until now. We went over making Tableau dashboards more accessible on that day, and so the challenge that day was to create a dashboard implementing accessible features with the Fix My Street (Glasgow) dataset.

For my dashboard, I focused on making sure that:

  • Screen readers could read the text, by inserting BANs in the worksheet titles (screen readers are unable to read anything in the chart area), editing Tableau’s default worksheet captions to be more descriptive of the charts shown, and including the color legend
  • The colors I used to denote pavement/footpath issues and pothole issues were colorblind-friendly (I used Palett.es to generate a color palette and Pilestone’s color blind vision simulator to ensure the colors had visual contrast)
  • The focus order made sense (the order in which keyboard-only users and screen readers navigate around the dashboard) – this took some testing because I had originally placed filters at the bottom of the left panel, forgetting that Tableau’s focus order goes from top to bottom, then left to right
  • If a user is more familiar with Excel’s accessible interface than Tableau’s, I included a download button to download the data as a .CSV or Excel file
  • The visualizations were easy to read, by keeping the gridlines for the bar chart and adding light borders around each section to visually separate them

Something I learned while working on this challenge was to always test out your dashboard every step of the way. Going back to my example about the focus order, where the filters were originally at the bottom of the leftmost panel, I’d forgotten that Tableau’s focus order goes top to bottom, then left to right, so I had to reconsider how I’d originally sketched out the layout. I then moved the filters next to the BANs, which also helped cut down on all the empty space that just the two BANs were taking up originally (negative space is always good to have, but too much, and it can feel ineffective).

For this challenge, I had to use what I’d been learning about Tableau in training in a slightly different way, and while I still have a lot to learn, I really enjoyed this exercise.

Author:
Vivian Ng
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