Creating Accessible dashboards - Dashboard week 1

by Jyoti Gupta

In our final week at data school, DS 25 were asked to do data prep + data visualisation + blog and presentation everyday on the topic assigned by Andy every morning. Its Dashboard day!!!!

Today’s task was to look at the New York City open data website and revive their current data dashboard (that has been getting a lot of complaints on the accessibility ) to something that could be accessed by mass. We had to make the information available for keyboard only user and users of screen readers.

It is indeed a good practise to make sure that your dashboard is accessible to everyone. This requires proper planning and attention to details especially when it comes to the design of the dashboard.

In the brief, it was mentioned that the dashboard should be accessible to people using screen reader or keyboard only which means I couldn’t put any information or chart in the tooltip.

To start with, I looked at the dashboard on the NYC opendata website.

NYC Opendata - NYC Council Constituent Services dashboard

There were two things that shouted at me the most ( in terms of accessibility issue):

  1. It wasn’t Screen Reader Friendly – which means it wasn’t reading any header or providing any information/insight about the chart
  2. Font size/colour: The title of the charts along with the light colour used was not an ideal combination for someone with vision impairment.

These were the points, I knew I would need to work on while redesigning the dashboard. Another thing I found was missing was KPIs.

The final dashboard I created is below:

To make it more accessible, I created few KPIs and put all the information in sheet titles. This way they will be read by screen reader. I used colours which are colour-blind friendly.  And lastly, I provided options to user to be able to download the data in pdf or table format.

Challenges

It sounds easy but while designing this dashboard I realised how difficult and overwhelming it can be. The biggest challenge I faced while designing was working with screen reader. Being not used to it, it was difficult to have each element of dashboard in a proper order. While the latest version of Tableau Desktop take cares of it (it orders the elements in left to right and top to bottom fashion), In earlier versions, order is the same the elements are put onto Dashboard. This means planning become even more essential when designing the dashboard.