This week is dashboard week and on day 1, we are dealing with accessibility. In as much as visualization best practice is concerned, the issue of accessibility considers the effort of not excluding certain groups of people from getting access to your visualization and making meaning out of it due to certain disabilities they may have such as color blindness, loss of profile vision, focal point problems, complete blindness, dislexya, disclaculia and many more.
On my task today, I am to work on a dashboard to ensure that keyboard only computer users can access information on this dashboard in the most efficient way so employers can make the most of their expertise?
These are the problems I identified with the dashboard which may be a barrier to keyboard only computer users:
- Random Focus order: This means by using the tab key the focus on the dashboard is not systemic.
- Inability to see keyboard positioning due to thick borders
- The presence of apply tabs in the filters
- The presence of tooltips
- Difficulty to identify exact figures on bar chart
- Difficulty to scroll up and down
Solutions to identified problems:
- Although I thought scanning through the filters and parameters would have been ideal, this couldn't be achieved. However, I fixed the random focus order by manual duplication of the dashboard before further edits was done and tableau then fixes this problem by applying the Z order method of reading.
- I removed all borders to enable users get a better picture of keyboard positioning.
- I also took off all apply tabs to make selection of filters easier.
- I took of all tool tips and insert a direction which could make users view entire data set.
- I put a label and also increased the of all bar charts to make figures clearer.
- With the issue of scrolling up and down, I would have changed the entire bar chart if I had more time for it to be grouped in rank bins.
Overall, I will say this has been a real challenge and a great learning curve at the same time. Thanks for reading.