DS24 Dashboard Week - Day 2 - Accessibility

by Muneeb Sajjad

Final week of training, dashboard week, day 2.

For the first two hours of the day we had a training session on accessibility with Collin Smith. We learned how we could try to design Tableau dashboards that were accessible for everyone.

The purpose of this is to ensure that as many people as possible can use, understand, and have access to our visualisations. We learned that data visualisation is an accessibility tool. (Think about how long it might take to perceive meaning from a table versus a well-constructed chart.)

The different ways in which you could try to make your dashboard more accessible: Labelling points, Using colour-blind accessible palette, Using a larger text size, Avoid using too much colour on one dashboard, Using titles and captions, Displaying big numbers and most recent/highest values clearly, and Describing how the user can interact with the dashboard.

Our task was create a dashboard that was accessible for everyone. We were given the FixMyStreet data via the Urban Big Data Centre. After a look quick at the data, it didn't look like required much prep. I removed duplicates, and deselected a couple fields that I wouldn't need. After outputting the data as a hyper file, I connected using Tableau.

The dashboard that I built shows the locations of the problems that have been reported in Glasgow. I included a couple filters to allow the user to select their area (postcode) and the problem that was reported (pavements/potholes). This would would allow them to see if a problem has been reported.

To make the dashboard more accessible: I included instructions on how to use the dashboard, I labelled the stack bar chart with numbers and the category, and included captions. To test the accessibility, I used only the keyboard (tab key) to navigate through the dashboard and make selections for what any random user might like to make. I also used NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access) that turns text you seen on a screen into speech for blind and vision impaired people. It worked well for most of the dashboard. If I had more time, to make the dashboard more accessible, I would have included a download data option for users that didn't find the map to be accessible.

Tableau Public Dashboard

Link to Tableau Public Dashboard: https://public.tableau.com/views/DashboardWeek-Day2FixMyStreet/Dashboard1?:language=en-US&:display_count=n&:origin=viz_share_link