Some of Power BI’s Accessibility Features
When creating dashboards for a wide variety of users, you should always plan to provide support for users with various disabilities. You can follow several different guidelines when designing your report. Just make sure when you are designing your report, there are multiple disabilities that could affect a person and your designs must take all these possibilities into account.
Here are some major areas, you should consider taking into account when you are designing an accessible Power BI report:
- Color Selection
- Make sure the color contrast between title, axis label, and data label text and the background are at least 4.5:1.
- Always confirm the contrast between non-decorative non-text elements and their background is at least 3:1.
- Ensure you avoid using color as the only means of conveying information. Use text or icons to supplement or replace the color.
- Keyboard navigation
- Navigating with a Screen Reader
- Tab Order
- Alt Text
- Make extensive use of alt text. There is a 250-character limit but do your best to be descriptive. If your report is largely static (not using a scheduled refresh), you can put the conclusion/message the user should take from each visual. Screen readers can’t read textbox contents, so be sure to copy them into the alt text.
- Titles and Labels
- Tooltips
- Don’t use tool-tips to convey important information. Users with motor issues and users who do not use a mouse will have difficulties accessing them.
- Do add default tooltips to charts as ancillary information. It is included in the accessible Show Data table for each visual.
- Don’t just rely on visual interactions or filters to show important information.
- Images with links and hyperlinks within a table or textbox can’t be selected using the keyboard. If possible, use alt text to describe the link so the user can decide if it is worth the effort to navigate to it.
- Avoid using images or color as the only indicator of a trend or status.
- Avoid auto-playing video or audio as those conflicts with the screen reader.
- Be sure to format numbers appropriately so screen readers don’t read out a long series of insignificant digits.
- Avoid the use of lots of decorative shapes and images within your report page that do not relay information to users since the screen reader reads each one of them.
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