The Essential Guide to Digital Accessibility: Ensuring Inclusivity and Compliance

In today’s digital age, ensuring accessibility in digital content is not just a legal obligation but a moral imperative. This session, led by Juliana Smith, delves into the critical importance of digital accessibility, highlighting its significance in creating inclusive user experiences. Attendees will gain insights into the principles of accessibility, including visual, auditory, cognitive, and physical considerations. The session will cover the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and their application in making digital content perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust for all users. Participants will learn practical strategies for implementing accessibility features in digital documents, such as using structured headings, providing alternative text for images, ensuring keyboard navigability, and maintaining high contrast ratios. The session will also emphasize the benefits of digital accessibility, including expanded market reach, enhanced user experience, and legal compliance. By the end of this session, attendees will be equipped with the knowledge and tools to create accessible digital content that meets WCAG standards and promotes inclusivity for all users.

Key Takeaways:
Understanding the importance of Digital Accessibility
Understanding and Implementing WCAG Standards
Recognise the importance of legal compliance and the expanded market reach through digital accessibility

Designing for Impact: Combining UI Principles and WCAG to Create Accessible Power BI Reports

In today’s data-driven world, crafting visually appealing and accessible Power BI reports is essential. This session will show you how to merge UI design best practices with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to create reports that not only look great but are also accessible to all users, including those with disabilities.

With over 1 billion people, or approximately 15% of the world's population, living with some form of disability, digital accessibility is more important than ever. This session will explore how UI principles such as layout, colour theory, and typography can be applied alongside WCAG standards for contrast, readability, and navigation. Attendees will learn practical techniques to design inclusive reports, including:

• Choosing contrasting colours that enhance readability while meeting WCAG requirements.
• Structuring reports with clear layouts that improve user experience for everyone.
• Configuring some of Power BI's built-in accessibility features.

This session is suitable for both newcomers to Power BI and experienced users. By the end, attendees will be equipped with practical techniques to enhance the inclusivity and usability of their dashboards, ensuring that data insights are accessible to everyone, regardless of their abilities.

Uncovering the Secrets of Dashboard Design

Great dashboards don’t just show data—they guide users to insights effortlessly. In this fast-paced session, we’ll unlock the power of alignment, white space, and page scanning patterns to create visually stunning, easy-to-navigate Power BI dashboards. Learn how to hack human perception with smart design choices, so your audience finds what they need before they even realise they’re looking for it! Expect real-world examples, and plenty of “aha!” moments. Ready to level up your dashboard game? Let’s go!

Target audience: Dashboards developers, focusing on Power BI but principles are applied across different tools.
Session duration 45 min

Implementing alternative accessible colours in Power BI reports

When designing visuals and reports, it’s extremely important to consider those who are not able to see the difference between certain colours. For those who are colour-blind, the ability to differentiate certain hues depends on the colour contrast ratio.
Approximately 350 million people around the world experience some form of colour-blindness ( inability to see the difference between certain colours).

Ideally, we should always try to use accessible colours when designing reports but often this is not possible due to existing branding guidelines and colour conventions like RAG (red, amber, green) used to report on performance and progress. The absence of easily accessible options for toggling between various themes and colour schemes in Power BI often results in reports that lack accessibility.

In this session, we will explore the built-in accessibility features of Power BI and discuss WCAG guidelines for colour usage. I will also demonstrate how to choose accessible colours and share a practical solution I have previously implemented, which enables users to switch between standard and accessible views. This approach not only enhances flexibility but also ensures inclusivity for all users. Additionally, this initiative has significantly raised awareness about digital accessibility among both users and stakeholders.

Optimising reports for people affected by vision impairment ensure equitable opportunities for all users. Taking diversity, inclusion and equity into account when designing visualisations and reports is a good way to express care and concern for all colleagues and stakeholders. It increases trust, collaboration and even innovation.