DS25 was tasked with individually improving a view from NYC OpenData on Council Constituent Services using universal design principles, making the information available for keyboard only users and users of screen readers, and maintaining all functionality from the current view.

The first step was to use the API from the NYC OpenData website to gather the data. To do that I used a Download tool and a JSON Parse tool in Alteryx, then I moved on to parse the rest of the data, pivot it and export it to Tableau Server (with the Publish to Tableau Server tool) (see image below).

Once I published the workflow, I connected to it in Tableau desktop, where I started building a dashboard that also included options for accessibility.

In the dashboard I included:

• captions below the charts to allow screen readers to explain the charts;
• a button and a description for the button to open a web page that explains how to use the keyboard commands in tableau;
• a parameter instead of a filter to choose a specific last date for the view;
• used bigger fonts and marks to help users.

Challenges:

• overall, it took a lot of time to make sure I included all the accessibility steps I wanted to have in my final dashboard;
• at the end of project time, the keyboard commands work nicely, but I could not solve some issues with the screen reader, which did not seem to pick up what I wanted to select;
• moreover, I could not close the filter pane while using the screen reader once I selected values to filter by.