How to make your Dashboards Accessible
Dashboards created with Tableau, Power Bi or any other data visualisation tool help us easily obtain insights and identify trends from data. These insights aid fast, well-informed decisions and should be accessible to everyone on your team.
However, those among us suffering from visual impairments may face difficulties in reading these insights.
Using accessible colors enable people with visual impairments or color vision deficiencies to interact with digital experiences in the same way as thier non-visually impaired colleagues.
But is the effort worth it?
There are an estimated 300 million people in the world with color vision deficiency. According to the WHO, in 2021, about 2.2 billion people suffer from visual impairment.
The chances that a member on your team today or in the future might benefit from an accessible dashboard is significant.
Furthermore empowering every person on your team and equipping them with the tools they need to perform at their best, benefits your team, your stakeholders and your business.
Why should you do it now?
Selecting a color palette and fonts that are accessible at earlier in a project, preferably at the start, takes significantly less time and effort.
Doing so at a later stage can require an overhaul of your existing dashboards which can incur significant effort.
How to get started
Check your color contrast.
If you are starting from scratch, you can use colorsafe.co to generate a color palette for you.
If you already have a color scheme in mind, you can test it for accessibility on the color contrast checker at webaim.org or on learnui.design.
Watch your font sizes
Using larger font sizes is always a good idea to increase the legibility of your dashboards. I recommend starting with a minimum font size of 16px.
The greater the font size the higher the accessibility even when you have lower than ideal contrast.
Further reading
If accessibility is something that interests you, you can find out more below:
- Guide on best practices with examples on web-accessibility.carnegiemuseums.org
- Standards on best practices for the Web: w3.org.
Note that even though the guides above are for the web, the same applies to all forms of digital media.
