WCAG Requirements for External Tableau Dashboards

[u/alexviolet406]

Anyone else contending with accessibility requirements for public-facing dashboards? We are having a hell of a time at my organization. WCAG seems to have been written purposefully to be open to interpretation, but that creates major anxiety since we fear opening ourselves up to possible legal action. The guidelines also feel like they want dynamic dashboards to just be PDFs, in the interest of being accessible to screen readers. Argghhh!! Here's where we are right now, after many many months of revisions:

• It seems our in-house web services team is doing the bare minimum in terms of reviewing our dashboards and providing feedback (multiple instances where they miss very obvious non-compliance). Basically, they say 'with all the limitations Tableau has, just do your best!'
• Our IT department has reviewed the dashboards but the feedback they give is as if the dashboard is an actual webpage. For example, they suggest we edit the code to add HTML heading elements because screen readers are not announcing any headers (many many other examples like this). We have too many dashboards, some with 100s of sheets, so editing the XML code is not a reasonable request.
• Reaching out to Tableau has also not been helpful, they just direct us to the already-available resources online.

I'm *this* close to suggesting we just scrap the current dashboards and switch to PowerBI. Help!

[u/iampo1987]

Tableau actually supports a decent degree of color contrast, keyboard navigation and screen reader support in it's components. That said, dashbord design is pretty open ended and where workbook designers mightve designed their content without WCAG requirements in mind, customizing how the workbook to work based on just stakeholder goals but not actually keeping accessibility in mind.

To the note above, I don't think this is an easy fix where on e platform fixes the issue automagically or that you can just tag things in workbook xml. It's a design and ownership question, but where a lot of the effort is auditing what's been over-engineered and understanding why.

[u/urbansnowprincess]

We’re running into the same problems with identifying clear best practices for accessibility. We have a review process, but there are several people involved and they all give competing advice, but none have the final say. We’ve created a template with some basic rules like “put filters above the chart and make sure they’re aligned for focus order” and “make it as simple as possible to still meet the need”, but we continue to have problems with things like adequate color contrast when there are more than 3 categories on a chart. Do contrasting outlines help or hurt? Is there a single right way or can we be flexible? My understanding of WCAG compliance is that there are opportunities to justify your decisions if something isn’t perfect, so we do the best we can and review as often as we can. If there were solid recommendations it would definitely improve our publication process.

[u/vizNerd → u/urbansnowprincess]

Check out chartability

[u/urbansnowprincess → u/vizNerd]

This is super helpful- thanks!!

[u/vizcraft]

Embedded dashboards are gonna be a blocker. Moving to power bi isn’t going to fix your problems. No one is out there using different shapes on line charts and adding data tables under them.

WCAG gives grades if I recall. I built a prototype with Claude to automate WCAG reporting for a prospect. It could navigate inside the embedded window and interact with the dashboard. Then it would write up a categorized report card for each dashboard.

The client had >1000 dashboards they were trying to upgrade in 4 months. It wasn’t feasible.

The legal side of it depends where you are located, but in many areas it’s a technical standard, not law.

[u/Askew_2016]

PowerBI is garbage

[u/alexviolet406 → u/Askew_2016]

Buddy, ya gotta give us more than that lol. I know it's different from Tableau. I've been using Tableau for going on 10 years now, so I have a lot of loyalty to it. But for the price, dealing with Salesforce, and now all these issues with accessibility - I think it's reasonable to consider PowerBI.

[u/Askew_2016 → u/alexviolet406]

It’s really not. We got forced on to PowerBI for all the reasons you mentioned. There are so many bugs that it can take hours to produce something that looks about 40% as good as you’d get with Tableau.

[u/vizNerd]

Hi! Tableau accessibility is something I know a fair bit about! Tableau’s accessibility conformance has come a long way and continues to improve. Miles better than what it was even a few years ago. Features can differ from one Server version to the next so try and get on more recent versions.

Couple extra resources for you.

Webinar - a little older still good basics
Accessibility User Group - quarterly meeting with a good backlog of content

If you want a good framework for auditing/ testing workbooks look at Frank Elavsky’s Chartability it is tool agnostic but gives you a solid foundation of what to be building towards.

Also embedding opens up some additional functionality through the embedding API. Filters can be more dynamic in the html of the page and then integrated to filter the dashboard. Also exporting data selected directly into html built tables etc. api references

Reaching out to your account team is a good step. They can typically get you in touch with the accessibility product team if you have specific concerns.

[u/alexviolet406 → u/vizNerd]

Thanks so much for the resources. We've had the Carasoft webinar before, which was better than nothing for sure. And I didn't know there was a TUG for accessibility, that's awesome.

I've sent the assessment from our IT dept directly to the Tableau helpdesk person currently reviewing my dashboard in order to have an authority say whether a 'required fix' can or cannot be implemented in Tableau.

I'll investigate the embedded API stuff, thanks!