1. Accessibility in practice
This demo will cover some of the accessibility options in Power BI. Let’s start with the CPI dashboard and see what we can do. We could potentially reduce the number of colors used on this chart, but in fairness, given the visuals available to us, I don’t think we’ve overused color. We’ve also spent time on creating meaningful titles, subtitles, and axes, so that’s great. Next up, we can add Alt Text to the visuals. We can find that in the Format Menu and then select the General drop-down.
We can set a static value for the text or set it equal to a field. Let’s set the card’s Alt Text to “The average Consumer Price Index as of July, 2021.” We can then do the same thing for other visuals, explaining what they are to somebody who uses a screen reader.
To make things easier to read, we might also add data labels. For example, the bar charts aren’t easy to understand, so let’s add data labels from the format menu.
Finally, let’s add some information to the tooltip for the CPI Breakdown by City. We’ll add seasonality text to this. After doing so, we can see that our data is not seasonally adjusted, meaning that these are the raw price values without taking into account how some prices can change at different points of the year.
After labeling all of our data, we can work to increase contrast and make text easier to read. Let’s stick to the CPI Breakdown by City chart and increase the contrast on the city names, changing the font colors for the axes from gray to black. We can do this in the Format menu, navigating into each axis drop-down and changing the color.
This makes it easier to read the axes, especially if your background color is not white.
The last thing we will look at is tab ordering for people who cannot use a mouse for whatever reason. To set the tab order, go to the View ribbon and choose Selection. Navigate to Tab order and now we can see how our visuals line up, and I can use the arrows to move tab order up and down.
Once I’m happy with the tab order, I can navigate smoothly between visuals. For report viewers who have difficulty seeing the values on a chart, they can right-click on a visual and select “Show as a table” to see the data in tabular format.
The last thing we’ll do is add a smart narrative to this dashboard. There’s not much room for one, but for the sake of demonstration I’ll have it overlap several visuals. We can see that the smart narrative had a field day with our visuals, displaying quite a few useful facts.
We can enter our own text here as well. For example, if I want to know the “item_name with the largest Consumer Price Index in our dataset”, I can add a value and type that in. Give it a name, like largest_cpi, and we can add some additional text like “ is the item with the highest recorded CPI.” Now we have another fact on the list.
These are dynamic, so if I select one of the cities in the CPI Breakdown by City, we can see the smart narrative, including our largest CPI value, change.
These auto-generated entries aren’t perfect, so you may wish to review them or even remove them if you’d prefer to create your own narratives instead.
You have the tools to make your reports more accessible, so let’s pop back into the exercises and give this a try.
2. Let's practice!