#WOW2022 | Week 40 | Applying Accessibility Principles to Data Visualization

October is Community Month here at Workout Wednesday. This means that each challenge will be brought to you by a guest coach from our wonderful data community

Kicking things off this week, we have a challenge by Collin Smith (@collinalldata). 

“Have you ever tried to incorporate accessibility into a Tableau dashboard? Incorporating accessibility into our designs is a way to ensure that as many people as possible can use, understand, and have access to our visualizations. Some principles of accessibility are easy to implement in Tableau. These include principles of universal design like appropriate use of white space, keeping text size from getting too small and ensuring that we don’t use color pallets that are indistinguishable to people with color-blindness.

Other elements of accessibility are harder to implement, partly due to the way that Tableau dashboards are constructed. These include setting a logical focus order (the order in which a user can press the tab button to navigate an application without a mouse) and making the data in the visualization readable by a screen-reader. These elements are critical for keyboard-only users and users with vision impairment. Even with intentional design choices, there are still hiccups and imperfections that even the best Tableau developer cannot avoid. When designing in Tableau, it is important to keep in mind a principle from Chartability (a data experience accessibility checker) and approach “accessibility as a scale rather than a state.”

To that end, this week’s Workout Wednesday will have multiple tiers, based on the involvedness of various elements of accessible design and the scale to which you want to introduce accessibility into your visualization. These tiers are set out in the requirements section.”