Do you have team members or an audience with web accessibility needs? Are you also using Power BI to display dashboards?
Let's review what is accessibility and options that are available within Microsoft Power BI to address those needs.
Accessibility
Web accessibility is the practice of ensuring that as many people can interact with websites/applications without barriers. These features may help someone with hearing, vision, motor, or other differences.
Power BI Accessibility Features
Microsoft is committed to following accessibility standards, and with this comes the ability to design accessible reports, accessible tools to help those creating those reports, ability to review reports with accessible features, and keyboard shortcuts.
Design with Accessibility in Mind
As report authors design reports, they have the ability to enable accessibility features. For example alternative text (alt text) used to describe the appearance and function of visuals used on within the report.
how to add alt text
Markers enable builders to utilize something other than color to differentiate pieces of information. This is available for line, area, combo, scatter, and bubble visuals.
Tab Order is also another feature that allows report builders to set the tab order in the report that best matches how users would process the information displayed.
Tab order displayed
An item that is less of a feature, but more of a consideration are themes. When choosing themes, builders should consider that is has enough contrast between the text and the background colors. There are tools available on the internet like "Accessible Colors" that can help determine if the colors chosen are accessible for others.
A few built-in features are Keyboard navigation, screen-reader compatibility, focus mode, and show data which allows a visual to be shown in a tabular form.
Creating a report using Accessible Tools
If a report builder needs to create a report with accessible tools there are different features that exist.
There is App-level navigation that allows the report builder to focus on the main parts of the app at at time. It goes in the order of objects, page tabs, panes, view navigator, footer, sign in, and error/updates bar.
There is also ribbon navigation with KeyTips over each command in the ribbon.
Key Tips
Visual pane navigation, once on Visualizations, allows a builder to use arrows keys through each visual and tell you what type is selected. Then the focus becomes the pane pivots and a user will have to use arrows keys to switch to another pane.
visualizations accessibility
Other features exist that allow a builder using accessibility features to navigate fields, formatting pane, selection panes, and dialog (Getting Started, Warning Bar, Q&A, etc) navigation.
Viewing Reports with Accessible Features
If a user wants to manually set a high contrast view, the person could navigate to view and then High contrast colors. Power BI will try to detect the settings already selected on a Windows computer, however the accuracy is based on the browser being used.
high contrast manual selection
To utilize other features see this article for other settings and options available. This article is the same article linked when as a Tool Tip within Power BI when a user hits Tab.
Accessibility Tips Article Link Pop Up
Keyboard shortcuts
There are various keyboard shortcuts that exist for moving around Power BI. Here is an image of a view of them. Navigate to this site to see the others available.
image of keyboard shortcuts in Power BI
These features are an overview of the accessibility features available to report builders and report viewers. Check out more accessibility information here and within the Power BI application.
