Accessibility: Methods, Process, and Adoption – Ep. 456

Part two of the accessibility deep dive. Mike and Tommy move from awareness to action—covering specific methods, tools, and processes for making Power BI reports accessible. From color contrast ratios to keyboard navigation to automated checking tools, this is the practical guide.

News & Announcements

• August 2025 Fabric Feature Summary — The monthly roundup of updates across all Fabric workloads.

Main Discussion: Accessibility Methods & Tools

KeyTips for Keyboard Navigation

Enhancing Accessibility in Power BI: Introduction to KeyTips — KeyTips enable keyboard-only navigation in Power BI reports, critical for users who can’t use a mouse.

Color Contrast

Color contrast is one of the most impactful and easiest accessibility improvements:

• WCAG Contrast Minimum Standard — The official 4.5:1 contrast ratio requirement
• TPGi Color Contrast Checker — Free tool to verify your color choices meet WCAG standards
• Color Blindness Simulator — See your reports through the eyes of color-blind users

Automated Checking

Stephanie Bruno’s Power BI Accessibility Checker — An open-source tool that automatically scans Power BI reports for common accessibility issues.

Process and Adoption

Making accessibility stick requires process:

• Include accessibility in your report checklist (not an afterthought)
• Use Power BI Adoption Tracking to monitor who’s actually using accessible features
• Data Savvy’s Accessibility Checklist — A practical checklist for report developers
• Train teams on why accessibility matters, not just how

Quick Wins

1. Alt text on all visuals — Screen readers need this
2. Tab order set intentionally — Keyboard users navigate in tab order
3. 4.5:1 contrast ratio — Check every color combination
4. Avoid color-only encoding — Use patterns, labels, or shapes alongside color
5. Test with keyboard only — If you can’t use the report without a mouse, it’s not accessible

Looking Forward

Accessibility is not a one-time project—it’s a practice. As Power BI reports become the primary interface for business decisions, ensuring everyone can use them isn’t just ethical—it’s practical. The tools exist; the challenge is building accessibility into the standard workflow.

Episode Transcript

Full verbatim transcript — click any timestamp to jump to that moment:

0:00 Good morning and welcome back to the explicit measures podcast with Tommy and Mike. Good morning, everyone.

0:32 Good morning, Mike. How you doing? I’m doing well. Our kids are now officially out to school, which is a good day. Everyone’s got their things, new shoes, new shirts, new pants, all the things. And now we have whisked them away to school. I have two now in high school, which is crazy. That is time is flying. Wow. My friend, congratulations first off. So, high school. Did you give them any tips or hints? , get all your homework done. Listen to your teacher.

1:05 Oh, smart. Jeez. There you go. So, they’re they’re good kids. , Tommy, how about you? Are all your kids now officially in school? All my kids are in school. I The youngest is in pre-K, so it’s half a day. So, half day so far. Yeah, the half day is good, but man, it really rushes your day. Like my wife usually takes her, but two and a half hours every day. It’s nice, but really can’t get too much done. It does break up the day. Next, next year will be a big moment for you when everyone is in full day school all day. I know. I know. And major because they

1:40 Come home on the bus together, which is all nice. All three of them. That’s nice. Yeah. So, buses are cool and especially since we’re going to have a polar vortex this winter. why the weather is so nice? Yeah. The weather gonna be super cold. Exactly. Yeah. This weather hasn’t been nice. Boy, someone wanted to smile upon us in this fall. It’s because it means it’s going to be negative -40. Oh boy. All winter long. Well, my son has been mowing yards this summer, so he’s been liking the extra rain. So, every time it rains, he’s like, “Yep, I see it’s green. Green on the grass, green in my pocket.” So, he’s been

2:12 Enjoying the the extra work there. All right, let’s get into our our topic today. to topic the topic today will be talking about rolling out managing and managing basically accessibility what methods are out there is there any process you’d have to do this and and how does this work with with either adoption so just talking through and unpacking what does accessibility mean inside power reports what are certain things that we should be considered about and what tooling is available to us either through Microsoft or other tools third party tools to help us do this better so but before we do

2:45 That We got a great news announcement, Tommy. , kick us over to the Microsoft Fabric blog. We just had a huge release and there is a ton of items on this list. Oh, yeah. Before we actually go through our favorites, do you want to announce our other thing that’s going on? Yeah, go ahead, Tommy. We have the Chicago Microsoft Fabric user group coming back in town downtown on October 2nd at 300 p.m. Central. It’s going to be an in-person event. We’re

3:17 Gonna I believe we’re going to still try to live stream it as well. Yep. We’ll do the best we can. Yes. But the goal is going to be the Microsoft office just north of Millennial Park on Randolph. And what we’re going to be doing is Chicago’s crash course into fabric. A lot of you watch videos, you see a little demos, but the goal is it you’re there take advantage of being in person to allow you guys to try to test drive, ask questions, and we can really interact with it and see the playground together. And that’s going to be really the entire focus of the user group. So,

3:51 Please make sure you register on Meetup and please make sure you ensure that you provide your first and last name on Meetup because when you go to the office to get to the room that we’re going to be in, you must show your ID and your name. So, all that is being taken care of. We’re going to have food. There is a fee to register. That is because that’s actually Meetup’s suggestion just to make sure that you are putting your money where your mouth is that you’ll show up and we won’t spend $70 more on Jimmy John’s.

4:23 Mhm. So you’re right. We want to make sure that you will be there. And as much as Tommy and I like leftovers. Jim John’s leftovers are great. Tommy eat for a week here, but it’s the cost of the event does not cover the cost of the food. We’re just trying to make all this work. All right. Anyways, excellent. It will be at the Anon AON Center in downtown Chicago. So, check it out. The meetup details are in the description in the chat window as well. , go hit up those informations. If you’d like to join us, please register beforehand.

4:55 All right, Tommy, let’s go over to the blog. Let’s pick a couple. , what’s your winners here? I actually haven’t had a chance to really look at it here. So, you should go first because I need to take a second here to skim through what I think is going to be impactful here. Where do you want to start? We can start with data warehouse. We start with the fabric platform. Let’s start with Well, now that we’ve talked to Brad who’s who’s really turned us on right into the warehouse, we should we should start right into the warehouse because that’s, , we already know all the things for warehouse now because we we’ve had four episodes around warehousing and where it’s going and how amazing it’s going to

5:28 Be. So, our max. No, just kidding. , so warehouse, there’s some pretty good updates. We actually did talk about them with Brad. So we are able to refresh the SQL analytics endpoint re via the rest API. We can use copy into and open row sets from one lake. So you can actually use those functions that are commonly in SQL using one lake data. and then two major really three major items from auditing and showing your plan both with an audit log with a for

6:02 With a visual experience and actually some naming specifications there as well. So audit logs huge deal especially with you’re dealing with the warehouse. So good to see these updates in fabric already. So let me I’m going to u jump around a little bit. I’m if you don’t mind I’m going to I’m going to pick a so do like a random pick your pick your winners here for like each release here that’s coming out. one I’m going to actually I’m going to do a double duty here. I’m going to pick two at the same time. , but one that I’m interested in, well actually

6:35 It’s a it’s a number of things here. Notebooks are sometimes a bit difficult to understand what’s happening when they’re running. , there’s a little less visibility there. Other tools, data bricks, , have other enhancements here around when you’re running a notebook, you can clearly see what’s what’s going on. It runs cell by cell and you can see live updates. , one thing I I’ll just note here is seeing what’s happening in the notebooks is very useful to me. I really enjoy that. And so, , one, I’m very pleased that autoscale for, , autoscale billing for Spark, which is more of just

7:09 Pay as you go Spark. That’s what it is. , let’s call it what it is. Pay as you go Spark is now generally available. I’m very excited about that. I think this is paving the way. , and we even talked about this with Brad recently, like, , this is something that’s important for Spark. I may need to use Fabric, but I need may need to use really large Spark clusters to do a job or something. I want that ability. And the same way I want to run SQL Server on a non-fabric capacity, I want to run in fabric, but I want it to be built as if it was outside of fabric, so that way it doesn’t fall over. I have the amount of compute that I need for an operational ERP or

7:43 An operational system as well. So, that’s something I’m very excited about. But the the other two that I’m really really jazzed about here are enhanced monitoring for Spark high concurrency. For those of you who’ve used this, it’s a little bit hard to figure out when a high concurrency job runs. if there are multiple notebooks running in it, what’s happening? Just the monitoring was a little bit awkward for the high concurrency mode because you’re actually running multiple notebooks on the same cluster. Okay. but if you’re trying to go back retroactively and run a pipeline and look at what’s happening and where’s all the CU’s coming from, it was a little bit challenging just to

8:15 Match things up. And again, it was like , Tommy, in our area here, we’ve had a lot of rain and so there’s been a lot of flies or gnats that have been around and it’s one of those annoyances that this has been one of those like you just swat at it and maybe you get it. It feels like this has been one of those like it’s not crazy annoying, but it’s just annoying enough that it’s like I’m glad you fixed it. So, that one that one I’m very happy with. and then also there was another one here that that went with the monitoring side of things which is notebook snapshots running notebooks. So you

8:50 Can see snapshots of notebooks and then as the notebook is running you get to see what’s happening during these snapshots throughout the notebook which I also think is very useful. a cell runs, a snapshot’s taken, a cell runs and you can see what happens like what step. My biggest problem was when a notebook failed and you had no documentation on like what cell of the notebook failed, it was very difficult to figure out what was the problem. I had to go back and rerun the whole notebook to figure out what the issue was. So I think these are just simple fixes that are very much improving my experience. All right,

9:24 Those are my things all around the notebooks. I got a few major ones. There are ones for the API specs that’s now GitHub repo. strange that it wasn’t more accessible before, but now the fabric’s API specification is available as a GitHub repo, which serves as the official source for all the REST APIs. This is what the Fabric Studio uses a ton, but it’s really hard to see where all of them are. So all the open API specifications. So, open API is a specification that simply is

9:59 Allowing a computer to understand what an API does and all the commands and functions. It’s a really great way and a lot of tools ingest that. So, you want to build a tool, use the open API specification. So, that’s a major one that I wanted to at least mention here. But, there’s also Michael or Mike, I’ve never called you Michael on the podcast before. I’m getting in trouble, I feel like. Is that is that is that what we say when Mike’s in trouble is we say usually it’s Mike but and and typically my like when it’s my family typically calls me Michael but very rarely do I get called Michael so I feel

10:31 Like I’m in trouble now. What do I do Tommy? Well you can now use in your fabric user data functions pandas dataf frames and series in notebooks. So this simply allows you to use the pandas data frames and series as input and output integration with Apache arrow and simply allowing seamless function with large data sets across Python, Pispark, Scala and R. I didn’t mention the snapshot one as well but I also wanted to mention Mike there’s more data agent

11:05 Support for large data sources. So custoto semantic model lakehouse data warehouse contain we talked about this at one part already 100 columns and measures and more than a thousand tables to a data agent which I’ll pause for if we’ve talked about this maybe yesterday or for some reason I won’t mention anything I said that day but Mike this is good to see they’re doing so much work on the data agents did you see all the database ones though there’s a lot of database and also I would also note here go Look at all the

11:38 Features around copy job. reset incremental copy job. reset the incremental copy from copy job. Right? So you’ve incrementally copied some things. You need like have a button to say reset. Just reload everything. So that’s now something that’s supported by copy job. Auto table creation from copy job. JSON support format for copy job. Like so there’s a you can see where the investment is going. There’s a lot of investment going towards this copy job experience. again I’m a little bit hesitant on this one. I I’ve tried out copy job. I’ I’ve had some feedback around it seems nice. It’s an easy UI,

12:12 But again, I’m going to rib the team a little bit here. It’s, , it seems like it’s priced a little bit higher in CUS than it should be for just doing the copy job and it’s and it’s wrapping some things easier. So, I I want Microsoft to make it easy for me, but I also want it needs to be relatively competitive with my notebooks and other experiences, too. So, I like that the fact that they’re adding these these features in here and making it easier for me to use. I’m also really trying to get them to push them towards, , let’s make it at a price competitive point with CUS as well, right? Let’s make it a good solution, not only to use, but also an economical

12:44 Solution to use as well. Intriguing. Well, there’s a ton on the database ones, Mike, that I wanted to at least mention as well. I didn’t see this in any other blog until today. So, we can now bulk delete queries. Just a simple UI change. It makes things nicer, Mike. It’s it’s a nice little Thank you so much for adding that which simply when you create those new queries they always save autosave. So thanks for that opening up like why why does every query need to autosave? Like if I just do a select whatever right the query editor

13:17 Shows up. Why? My question is like why am I always why am I always autosaving all of the query maybe let me just say this way I feel like this would be an option on the home ribbon that would just be like queries autosave on right queries autosave off right I feel like that would be a little bit better cuz then sometimes Tommy when you’re in a table with lots of tables and lots of queries going on you’re constantly investigating multiple tables at once or writing lots and you could have easily five six seven eight queries made very quickly and I’m like oh Now, now they’re all named weird

13:50 Things and I don’t know what they’re named. Like, I’m like, , I’m lost. So, it feels this is good. The fact that there’s more management here means everyone’s building all these queries very fast. Also, by the screenshot, I’m going to poke a little fun here. In the screenshot, it literally says query 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9. Like, they’re not naming any exactly. And then I And then I get lost like what table did this query come from? Where where does like I don’t know. So I feel like at some degree too, Tommy, it’s like it’s a little bit of a it’s it works, but it’s it gets a little

14:23 Rough around the edge as I say. Yeah. I I wish would work like SQL Server Management Studio creates your tabs but doesn’t save it. Yeah. And what if you just want to use SQL management studio? Whoa, that’s literally the next bullet item. Open your database ins SMS integration with the fabric web base editor. I love this a ton, Mike. So just nice seeing all these additional integrations. Nothing too major, some UI things, but these are the things Mike we talked about with filling in the gaps, filling in

14:54 The little cracks in terms of where we see the limitations of band-aids, the paper cuts. So yes, good. I love to see these are the improvements. Now I also will note here we’re also getting up very close to Microsoft Fabric Conference Vienna. We’re about two weeks away. So typically when Microsoft releases things, they’re releasing things that are like, okay, these are good, useful things to release, but big announcements typically come out at conferences. So I’m excited to see what happens at the next conference in Vienna. If there’s any late major announcements or any major improvements coming that will be announced there. So

15:27 I’m very excited about to see that, see what happens here in Vienna. , and for those of you who are our European listeners, we’ll be there. , so myself will be there. There’ll be other people from the MVP community as well that’ll also be there additionally. Anyways, with that being said, any other news items topic, Tommy, that we want to go through before we hit our main topic for today? Well, let’s find out what our main topic All right, let’s go into our main topic today. We’re going to talk about rolling out managing accessibility options as well. Whoa. And welcome guest caller today.

16:00 So, we have a guest caller today, Stephanie Bruno from the community of MVP, business owner, entrepreneur. I can’t say enough good things about about all the things that you do. But Stephanie, welcome to the show. Hi, Stephanie. Friends, thank you. Thanks for having me. I’m so excited to be here with you talking about we have brought Stephanie I was going to say Stephanie is a leader in accessibility messaging in reports and has built tools around this and just

16:32 Spent a lot of time in this. So let’s just unpack accessibility. So let’s just maybe very quickly at the beginning here just give what does for people who are maybe newer to PowerBI or when we’re start talking about the topic of accessibility we should probably do like a run round round robin here. This may mean different things to different people but we probably need to centralize a little bit on a definition. What does this mean? So Stephanie, you’re the you’re the guest here. maybe give us a quick a quick run around around or a couple bullet points here of like what do you

17:04 See accessibility being and then Tommy and I will just try and stumble our way through it and figure out yeah well okay I like to try to keep things simple so for me it’s really just making sure that the reports that we build are available and accessible to as many people as possible not everybody can see great I can see Mike you and I both have glasses on, right? So, we have to think about things like that. That’s pretty obvious, but there are many other other limitations that people have

17:36 When they’re trying to understand our reports as well. So, accessibility is just making sure that we keep in mind that not everybody has perfect vision or can use a mouse or things like that. We want to make sure that the insights that we spend so much time developing for them are available to people. I I recent I can’t remember when it was but a couple years back I went to a conference it was one of the MVP summits and someone at the MVP conference was was speaking to accessibility and how they use it and they themselves couldn’t use a mouse and

18:10 Had difficulty running the keyboard and so I I saw the firsthand the importance of being able to tab my way through and having like a screen reader actually being able to like tell you what was on the page a little bit as well. , I was floored by how quickly they could listen to the screen reader. It was absolutely phenomenal how fast it was. And it didn’t take them very long to navigate through. I could imagine again as a as one who builds reports, sometimes I put a lot of things on report pages and they all look a little different and we don’t maybe have

18:42 Standardization across our organization for where menus are, where things are. I can imagine it’d be very confusing for someone to walk into a collection of reports where they’re not similar and you’re constantly trying to figure out where did everyone put things? Why is this so disorganized? It feel So that seems like a really good a good point as well. All right, Tommy, anything you would want to add around accessibility or things that you’ve interacted with as either because there’s really two sides of accessibility when we’re talking about PowerBI. There’s PowerBI accessibility when you’re creating a report. the

19:16 Desktop accessibility, but then there’s all the other sides of accessibility for the consumers, both color blindness. Isn’t it like three in five men have some form of color blindness? It’s a much higher number than I realize. And there’s also some kind. Yeah. Sounds like something I can Google here real quick. I’ll just give you the number on that one real quick. It’s a higher number than have some stats here, but it is it’s a lot higher than you would expect. Yeah. So you we can’t really think about it as like a nice to have or going above and beyond. It really is.

19:47 Yeah. It’s the basics that’s important. and you just you don’t want to assume anything about your audience. So a a quick Google Gemini query and again this is I’m quoting this from somewhere else. I don’t know don’t quote me on this now. Around 8% of men worldwide have been affected by color blindness. One in 12. So and and this seems to be a higher ratio than women at this point. So the men just have poor vision. So my brother-in-law actually has he can’t see like really reds and greens very well. So Stephie

20:20 You were talking about thinking about your report to some degree when we present colors that are this is good this is bad. We have to be careful around the red green standpoint cuz that does make sense for like a light and driving and that thing as well but they’re so close together for some people they may think they’re the same color and misinterpret some of the data on the report page. And I think Tommy and I have talked about this in prior episodes, which is even though we’re building reports, we’re actually communicating with people visually like or or through the report. And again, we

20:52 Have other things here, screen readers and and items as well. We have to think about what’s the message, , it’s Tommy, you’re saying there’s two sides of this. There’s a report builder side and there’s the receiver side, the the consumer side. And we really are communicating between people with language that is just visuals. , and this is one of the reasons why I’m a big proponent of , oh boy, now the name’s going to escape me when I say it. , it’s the International Business Standards. IBC. Is that what it is? International

21:26 Business Communication Standards. IBCS. I think it’s what it is. ICBS. I Yes. I don’t think there’s any IBCS standards. Yes. Which is neat because it has like a standard by which you can like write down visuals. No. Let me just pause right there. Stephanie, what do you think? Have you have you played with the IBCS standards at all? Are they even accessible? Like is this something we should be like putting on our reports? What do you think? Ones that I use are WAG. So this is the I don’t even know what it stands for. WAG is web accessibility initiative.

22:01 So this is accessibility for web pages. So that’s the one that I usually look Love it. , so this is for example what we use when we’re trying to make sure that we have enough color contrast, which we can get into a little bit more in detail, but those are the ones that I use. So I’m going to bring that up here as well. , there’s a there’s actually a number even just googling WC a there’s a number of like accessibility checkers. You can put your website URL here and it’ll tell you like where there’s not enough color contrast between like a text and like a background color.

22:34 Cuz all of a sudden everyone’s going to go dark mode and like we’re putting like gray text on black backgrounds and reports and and like oh boy this is a mess. We can’t even read this one. Oh, speaking of which, there are actual standards. There are numbers that we’re supposed to be using to compare. So it’s not we can use the squint test ourselves. , if you just squint a little bit at your report and see if you can still see things, that’s great. But there are, , calculations we can use, too. I’m going to I’m going to be a bit revealing here. I’m going to run I’m going to run through the website checker, our own website, powerb.tips, and see how how bad it is.

23:08 Oh, it gets a medium. I get a medium. A 96 out of 100. Okay. Hey, 96 out of 100. It’s an A. Most of my college tests, so yeah, that’s great, right? Amazing. Amazing. It’s It’s funny because honestly, Mike, to your point, and I know it’s being joking, but a lot of us can look at accessibility as I just do the bare minimum, the good enough, or we think of the extreme cases like if you get a 60, it’s like, ah, that should get most people think it’s not terrible. But from really the developer point

23:43 Of view especially in an organization or really anyone who’s delivering reports where do you put that in terms of the priority and the critical u conscious thinking of accessibility and I want to start there because I I want to get into the different types of accessibility but let’s start the conscious thinking of it and what’s good enough or should we are we even allowed to think that way or should we even think that Right. We should start small. , we should all try to do a little bit better than we’re doing because I think most of

24:15 Us probably don’t have that in our report building checklist, , as as the accessibility standards. , so I think it’s great to say, yeah, what’s what’s the minimum? How can I just do a little bit better? , so we can make progress, not perfection, right? So, , yeah, I think that’s fine to start small. It’s better than nothing, which is probably where most of us are. What is there and and again this is in my mind I feel like there’s a threshold also at some point like so

24:49 We all need to be like understand that this is available. we should be building and designing for accessibility. But if I’m building report just for myself, right, or a small audience of just a couple team members on my team. Now again, I’m making some assumptions with a small group of people, but my argument here would be is is , , as we increase the size or the the number of people looking at our reports, the opportunity for people that need accessibility features is going to be much higher, I would think. And so is in your Stephanie in your mind is there

25:22 Like a break point is there is a point in time where you’re saying like look in my experience or things that you’ve done the past do you started like okay anything above like three people five people a team is that’s when we’re really starting to like again I’m thinking about like an admin administrator side of things like where do we in the process start saying okay this number of people looking at this report is important enough that we need to step back and Okay, what is our accessibility standards and let’s how do we test our reports to say at least we

25:55 Have some checkbox to say that that’s acceptable. Does that make sense what I’m So there’s like a I feel like there’s a bit of a threshold or a tipping point here that I’m trying to sus out a little bit of like where does that tipping point feel like it exists? Yeah, I think you’re right. And some of the things are a lot easier to do than others as well. So, , I think it’s probably the very easiest one we have, easiest easiest one we have is tab order of your visuals. So, you were talking about the screen reader earlier, right? yeah. So, tab order what that’s going to

26:30 Do is is ensure that the way that we generally in the US read our visuals is top to bottom, left to right. Right. But when you put visuals on your page, the tab order is just assigned by what order you put them on your page. So when we inevitably move things around and we add a title later on, the tab order is going to get all all wacky. and fortunately, it’s the easiest thing to do. So you can incorporate this and we all should incorporate this into our standards which is right before we’re going to

27:02 Publish. Just open up the selection pane on the page. Click the tab order button and there’s a single button you can click to make it do that left, right, top, bottom. You just click it once and it’s going to rearrange the tab order for everything. So in, , two or three clicks, you can get your tab order at least in the right order. So that’s going to take you almost no time. So, I think we should just all be in the habit of doing that every time before we publish a report. We should do that. I’m going to try

27:33 Layer on that one. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll try and grab the documentation on this. I didn’t even know that button existed. How how good I am accessibility. So, this is this is where So, I’m going to go grab the documentation. There’s a there’s a document. It shows you the button inside the little panel on the right hand side. So, I’ll make sure I go grab that link. I’ll put it in the description as well. And then also in the chat window here for those of you who don’t know the button exists, Tommy and Michael, we’ll put the button in there so you can see where the button lives. Awesome. Great. Yeah, you used to have to do it by yourself manually, but they did add that in I don’t know a few years ago. So,

28:06 It’s just a single button. Now, the second item on there is there’s also a little eyeball next to each of your visuals in the tab order because sometimes it doesn’t make sense to have a screen reader read something out loud. So if you have a decorative item like a line for example, right? You don’t need to waste the user’s time by having the screen reader read that out loud. So you can just mark that one as invisible to a screen reader. What what would be an item that you would feel like that would be like maybe like a shape, right? like a shape that’s

28:38 Maybe like provide like a shape that’s behind I have a visual or maybe there’s two visuals and I have a shape behind it provide like a little border or color like some more like a stylistic thing we we don’t need you to read like square right oval right that doesn’t help again thinking about the context of the report and then what that is doing to the users okay great I like that one too that’s another good one y so that one those are the very very easiest I think we do those in all of our reports. And it’s good to get

29:11 Into the habit of that for sure. So your your idea, , your question about threshold, I’m thinking that should be an always, right? Because that’s also a good habit to get into. what were you gonna ask Tommy? I was going to say what else falls into that always category especially that it’s hey dummies it’s very easy to do some of these like those lowhanging fruits but I imagine some of them are also more conscious thinking a little more planning so what else are we missing because again we’re not very smart or at least I am so not

29:45 Well I think you were just talking like about red and green for for good and bad that’s such a habit that we we have it’s So I think we all have to get out of that habit because like you said Tommy there are a lot of people with color blindness and we often use color alone to convey information in PowerBI reports which we shouldn’t do. We should have another way of making sure that somebody who can’t un see the difference in the colors can get the information. so that’s a two-part thing. One is start using an

30:19 Accessible theme. And I know you guys love talking about themes with the theme generator, right? All about the theme stuff. Yes. Correct. Right. So, there are built-in accessible themes in PowerBI desktop. , but I’m sure that you can build some accessible themes for people as well. So, I think that’s another easy one is just try to get out of that that red green habit and and use those themes. , using an accessible theme isn’t to guarantee that everything you put on your page is going to have enough contrast. , but it’s a good start. So,

30:53 That’s another lowhanging fruit. Accessible theme. Mhm. I like that one a lot. And, and desktop actually comes with a couple there’s a couple other like very stark you can even go into like high contrast mode for your port. So, it looks like a like an 80s Commodore. It’s like high contrast like bright green. everything’s black on the page and it it it pulls out that high contrast for you. So there is also right when people are using and that’s could be for any report. Anyone can switch a report over to high contrast at any point in time. That just part of that’s part of the

31:25 Desktop experience or publish report experience. You can you can switch at any point you want. Correct. Yep. And also there we have another tool I think that I mentioned to you earlier which is the color blindness simulator. I maybe you can put that link in the chat. That one is really fun to play around with because you can just upload an image into it. So what I’ve done is I’ve just taken a screenshot of a PowerBI report and then upload the image of it and then you can test it out on all different types of

31:56 Color blindness and it’s really shocking to see, , wow, I really was relying on these colors to convey this information and now I can’t tell what it’s trying to tell me. So that’s a fun one to play with, too. And is that the the one the link you gave us which is the color contrast analyzer. Is that what you’re thinking about or is that a different one? That’s another good one. So we’ll use that one too. But no, this is the color blindness simulator. Coal blinder. It’s called cobless color blindness simulator. Yep.

32:26 Yep. They got out of order here a little bit. that one’s really fun to play with. It’s just, , if you don’t have color blindness, it will show you what your page looks like to someone with different types of color blindness. Oh, interesting. Okay. Excellent. And so this one you can just straight up screenshot it, put it here, and then you and then you can pick. It looks like it’s got a picker here for different types, , weak red is weak, green weak, blue weak, and so then showing you those influences of

32:58 Those different color blindnesses or color blindness effects, right? Cuz I guess everyone’s eyes picking up colors slightly different. some of those some may have different cones or more of them than others. And I guess that what helps your eye read those things differently or not. Very interesting. This is a good one. I like this site. I haven’t seen this one before. This is a new one for me. Yeah, I like that one a lot. Yeah, I’ve used actually in the past I’ll put this in the link as well. It’s called Color Blindly. It’s a Chrome extension. So, I don’t know if you had any like tools because when

33:30 I’m in the web, it’s always going to be a different experience. one other thing that I remember being shocked by Oh, yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Can you help me unpack how you use it? Like so color blind you’re using on the web. Does that mean you go you just it’s a Chrome extension. So you just add it to Chrome and then you just go to like the report on powerbi.com. You go to any page any any report and it basically you once you click on the extension you choose which type of color like color blindness because it shows all eight and then it

34:03 Will show what that report or page or whatever the navigation is looking like at that time. Oh okay. So I’m going to put that one in there as well. color blindly right in your browser. And it looks like it works with both Chrome and Edge. Looks like it seems like it works with both Edge and I’m sure there’s a Firefox one, too. Yeah. So, surprise. Yes. For all five users of you out there using Firefox still, there is probably one for there as as well for you. All right. So, color blowing right in your browser. Okay. Put that in there as well. Awesome. Great. Color can be hard, , because you don’t always know which colors are going

34:35 To come up on your bar chart or whatever. So color is not one of the easiest ones, but I think if you just start with one of those accessible themes that that’s at least a good start. other easy ones I think are with your theme. I think in what what is the standard like default font size if you don’t have a custom theme? I think that’s all I know. Titles it’s 11 and then for visuals I think it’s nine. Yes, correct. So, one of the first things I do is I go in and I just

35:07 Increase it automatically because that’s just too small for a lot of people. , another easy thing to do. That’s and that’s one you can adjust in the report. But then this is where again and I think Stephanie, you’ll also agree with this here. I like being lazy to some degree. And I really like to push on the theme file. Well, I do like efficient. Maybe maybe is the right the right term. , but I like pushing on the theme file pretty hard. And this is where I , , I was recently doing a talk around just

35:39 Theming and and and building things. And I really do feel like having the theme file become like the starting point for a lot of these things that makes sense. , , shockingly, I sent out a survey. Do people like to see the title of the visual on the lefth hand side, which is the default? The default is the titles on the left, or do you prefer title in the middle? Right. or to your point, set the title size, right, to 14 or 16 or whatever that number needs to be for the page. And I can do all that in the theme file. I do it

36:12 One time and then every single new report I get automatically has the right colors, the right style, the right, , the details. , and I’m I’m really adamant about pushing all those things into spend some time building out a proper theme cuz then you you simplify like the the complication of going through every single visual and making sure every title on every visual is the right size. That’s a lot of work and especially if you have a lot of stuff, three or four items on a page, a couple pages per the report, you’re spent now

36:45 15 20 minutes just going through every page to make sure it’s right. And what happens when I give this report to Tommy and Tommy’s like, “Yeah, great. I’m gonna add another page. Does Tommy adhere to the same st like have we have we communicated against us? It’s internal communication. Hey Mike, have you given Tommy the directions of like these are the font sizes we need to check for? This is like this is how it should look.” Interesting. Very neat there as well. We like to make our lives easier, right? So we we’ve already started we’ve come up with a list of some pretty easy things, especially if you use a theme file. , right. So, we can increase our

37:19 Font size. We can make sure we’ve got an accessible color palette. And then, of course, before we publish, what button do we click? Oh, the shortcut button. Shortcut button. Top left button. It’s a tab button. Tab. Tab order. Tab order. You So, I think all of these things we should just always be doing, right? I don’t even think this is a there’s a threshold. , we can start getting into some more extra effort ones as well. How how do we

37:51 Mike? Yeah, I’m I’m thinking here about this one like so I like all these these are like good rules and guidelines to start doing accessibility checking. How do we start scaling this? Like what does this look like to scale out to like again we talk a lot about like administration pieces and like how do we can so we set some good boundaries of like good starting points. These are places where we should begin. When we have a team now of three, four, five people, one, we can do some time to train people and make sure they’re educated on like how we like to build reports. This is what we do. But stuff’s always going to slip through the cracks. There’s there’s

38:24 Always things here that are not quite right or again, people have the liberty, right, on I’m using size 14, but I’ve increased my page size by like double, right? So now it’s not size 14. Like it’s still size 14 font, but like the page size has gotten bigger. So now it looks smaller again. So like there, , we have individuals building like analysts that are building like 30 visuals on a page and that’s okay because you’re doing like an analyst like report, but now you’re overwhelming people and do we really need 10, 15, 20 visuals on a page? Is that really adding

38:58 Value to our final report? So I guess here I’d like to maybe explore a little bit of what does this look like for a team and how do we start helping the team check and regularly get out good content? What does that look like to you? Yes. Perfect. But before we do, I just have one other feature I do want to mention as a basic important one which is the alt text. So on every visual there’s a little in the properties pane you can put alt text on it. So this is for the screen reader. So for people

39:30 Who are using a screen reader, like you said, , it flies through and you can hear it really quickly. , but it’s important to put good alt text on visuals that are non decorative. So for those decorative ones like a shape, , and a line, things like that. You don’t have to put a description on. You just have to make sure it’s not read by the screen reader. But for everything else we should because what the screen reader will read is the type of visual and the title and then whatever alt text we use. so it is important to add that alt text.

40:01 Okay. So now in the description as well. Yes. Okay. So the easiest low hanging fruit are tab order and alt text. Color contrast is harder but it’s also important. So how like you said, how can we scale this? how can we make sure that we’re we’re actually following these best practices. so in order to do that, I made a tool called the accessibility checker. It’s just a desktop tool that I have in GitHub that will it’ll go through and

40:34 It will tell you all about your tab order and alt text. I also made an attempt to have it check color contrast, but I quickly found that was really really hard. me iffy, but it will automate letting about your tab order and your alt text. , and then what I love about this is because, , government, for example, it’s it’s a requirement. You can’t publish a report unless it meets the accessibility standards. So, we have our friend John Kursky, I think I saw his name

41:06 Here, and he took that accessibility checker and he improved it. He made it so that you could check multiple files and you can check it on reports that are published in the service. The way I originally had it, it was just, , local files. so he improved it and he made it so that you can do it through the service as well. So it’s really cool. So I know he was telling me that’s because he works for government clients. He says this is just part of their process. They when they’re going to publish a report, it has to go through the accessibility checker because it is a requirement. So

41:39 In those cases where you might have those needs you can do the same the John Kursky method of making sure that your process requires the reports to be checked and and in this process the way it’s written right now again we’re talking about things that are it’s a semianual right there the the checker is pointing to reports it’s reading and are you reading the PBIP format is that what you’re going after here or you’re going after the regular PBXIX files does both. So you could have it it’ll do

42:11 Either. Oh, excellent. Even better. All right. So, doesn’t matter if it’s a PBX file and like the we’ll call it like legacy or the older format. And now there’s the PBIP format, which is the new format, which I love, by the way. It gives us a whole lot more extensibility for like finding things and seeing what’s in the reports. , but the checker can go through and read both of those, but still sem. Someone has to get a report. , , Tommy build it. All right, Mike, we’re going to commit a change. We’re going to go from dev to test. Now is the point to Okay, did you run the checker? What’s the result of the

42:43 Checker? Like, let’s part of your review process as you move through there. Correct. Okay. So, yeah, manual process. Yeah, it seems like there’s a lot being taken from the accessibility checklist, , the desktop document. I’ll put this in the chat mic so you can put it into YouTubes. But this looks like to be a pretty good standard what we’re talking about here. we a lot of things we’ve already talked about color contrast, the colors that you’re choosing. and also one of the things you just mentioned was

43:16 The all text. when it come to visual interactions, one thing I wanted to touch on briefly if we’re if there’s anything else with the accessibility tech checker, let us know. is on the list. I just wanted to do a shout out to Megan Longoria because I don’t think we’d have this checklist on docs without her because she is the one who she put the first list together on her own blog. so big thank you to Megan Longoria for this focus on accessibility. Yeah. And I think this is a good thing.

43:48 I used to print out checklist whenever I think Melissa coach used to do a checklist for report building and printed it out just to make sure and this is another one that probably should be part on on my wall or somewhere that can be referenced. There are some I don’t want to say fuzzy areas with accessibility, but Mike, you briefly mentioned it before where yeah, we might have the good text size, the visual, , , colors, but some people deal with from a vision point of

44:22 View, their laptop is zooms in or scaled in. And on everyone else’s computer, it looks fine. It looks, , easy to read. There are zoom in features, but I I’ve dealt with issues, one with, , I can’t see everyone’s screen size, what device they’re using, and I don’t know their vision. And then also two, trying to design for the interaction side of things with from an accessibility point of view, which becomes very difficult. What can you help me understand what you

44:56 Mean that like design for the the visual side? help me unpack like a couple of things. The interaction side, the so clicking on buttons, clicking on a bar data point to see other things filter from the slicer to the filter pane, all the things that we like to clicky clicky as a consumer that all become a lot harder for someone who may have disability or someone who is using a screen reader or whatever the case is. this triggers a rightly okay squirrel. This is this is squirrel on this one.

45:28 How does accessibility work with tool tips or hover over tool tips? Is there anything does it does? I was just going to bring that one up. Yes, that’s that’s one that Yep. So, when we have like custom tool tips, I don’t think it all gets read by the screen reader. I don’t think there I think there was an update maybe a year ago, but that’s something that’s definitely worth testing. And that’s another example of , you don’t want to have information that isn’t shown somewhere else only in a tool tip

46:01 Because it might not get read. so like a custom tool tip that maybe has a ton of extra information that might not be read by the screen reader. So that’s an example of something we have to be careful of. And that one bums me out because I just love those custom tool tips, . So yes, they’re a double-edged sword for me because careful. Yeah. I I like the idea that I can get details from a tool tip, which makes sense. But on the other hand, sometimes it’s like it’s too aggressive. Like if I if I put over the tool tip, it’s like too much and I want it to like go away cuz I can’t actually see the table and I put my cursor around and

46:33 Like I want to select something in a table that has a tool tip and it gets very difficult for me to even just select something in the table without having the tool tip aggressively like, “Hey, I’m here popping up like hello.” I’m like, ah, I feel like there’s a way I need to like have visual turn off. Like, turn off this dog on visual tool tip. I can’t stand it. Like, the visual should have like a toggle for that if I if I just don’t want it. Like, okay. Yeah, I’m done. , ideas.p powerbi.com. I guess we should we should go there. Yep. I was also Yeah. And like I always seem to want to click on a, , if

47:04 There’s a chart on a custom tool tip, I want to click on it, but yes, you can’t. So, there’s no link at the end of that. Yeah. Right. as fun as those can be, use them with caution, I guess. Now, I want to also come back here to our our comment around the process a little bit here because John Kurski is in the chat. So, thanks, John, for joining us. Really appreciate you being here today. John Kurski has been working with Stephanie and then working on this accessibility checker. And one of the comments here he makes is the accessibility checker inside Powerba.com the service can

47:38 Automatically check via the XMLA endpoint. So the XMLA endpoint is an API call where you can go get data directly from the XMLA endpoint during a pull request. So if we’re talking like proper control, we’re talking git, we’re talking continuous integration, continuous deployment, this tool accessibility checker hooks into that. So then you can during a pull request, the report can automatically be picked up. You can automatically point it to the new report that’s coming through the pull request. And there’s a little bit more automation around that.

48:10 So, I want to just point that out. , I’m a big proponent if we’re going to add more process to the system, we should be aware that this exists and we should be aware that this is somewhat automatable. , because I think that’s , my opinion here, the only way for people to truly adopt things is to have some of this stuff just become part of the process. And it it has to be more than , make sure you check it cuz I don’t want to tell you every time the report’s coming out, did you check for did you check for all the items? , do we have all the visuals? Do you have the tab order correct? I shouldn’t

48:41 Have to do that. It should be part of like here’s the report. I’m going to publish it. Boom. Here’s like a little output or here’s the accessibility checker report. You just go to it and then boom, I can see right away, , green, green, green, green. Yep, we’re done. It It’s done the checks for me, at least enough to get going. We can move on to the next step. So, I just want to point that out. Really good point there. Yes. Huge thanks to John for that. I think this may go into from so when you design for a drill through or do you

49:14 Again there are some features I feel with the accessibility or that when you think about accessibility I feel like no matter what you can do it’s still going to be more difficult like I think a lot of drill through I think a lot of the if you were to do those what if parameters those make that it’s possible using keyboard readers some of the accessibility tooling But it’s not a fun experience. And this is the conflict I have in my head. I want to have all the features and the features for, you

49:46 Know, the in a sense the standard that you would expect without thinking of these things, but you don’t want to eliminate all these features because we’re making sure that each report in sense is easy for a keyboard navigation. Is there conversations that we have with our consumers or with client or whoever the end users are on things that we need to know beforehand to accommodate or is there always like hey drill through and we’re only going to do if we request there’s

50:18 This standard we need to be aware and conscious of. Ooh. So, so you’re asking Tommy what do we push back on? Like where how much of the like because users will ask for whatever they want to ask for. What’s the level of push back we should be giving for some of this? Yeah. Yeah. Good point. And yeah, off the top of my head, , I don’t know which features are and aren’t well supported with a screen reader or, , without using a mouse, for example. But those that would be a really good list to get created, right? So that we know

50:51 Okay yeah we can do this but if report requesttor if we do this you have to understand that this feature is not accessible and what do we do with that. but yeah I don’t I don’t know off the top the top of my head which ones are and aren’t. I think this goes back potentially to my initial question here a while back was what’s the scale like when when do we say no to certain things at certain points or when do we require certain levels of this? Like for example, right, one of the things I’m I’m going to make an assumption here.

51:23 John Kers is working with government projects on his on his his team, right? I’m going to assume that in their statement of work that they’re saying, right? Hey, we’re going to build these reports. There’s a requirement for here’s accessibility. It needs to be accessible. Here’s what this means. And then actually writing down like, okay, we expected to have this, this, and this, and this. And again I think this is where leaders or managers of BI systems should be again you need to be aware of the feature you need to be aware of the different items tab order colors those things and that

51:57 Way you can specify as a company or organization again I’m guessing the contracts themselves here’s what excessively spell it out this is the standard we’re going to stick stick by and then when things don’t meet that standard requests can come in and again if you have and thinking about the process here. If you don’t document these things and say we’re going to align to oh Stephanie I forgot the name of the standard the wet 2 the the web standard wagg if we’re not going to clearly align ourselves to the wikag standard then you could you can easily

52:29 Push off requests like so hey this is what we’re going to adhere to these are the things that we’re going to check these are our requirements and then when requests come in Tommy’s like oh man I could really use a ton more my page needs to be just a lot longer. This font size is too big. Let’s just make it smaller. Like those are you’re going to get people that are going to push back against the standard. And then you can say, “No, that’s that doesn’t fit our standard. , we can’t change that because of XYZ things.” Now, again, let me and I’m going to be a bit of a devil’s advocate here, right? So, where’s the

53:02 Break point? where is the break point of like, okay, as the central BI team, we’re going to put out reports and things of a certain standard, but internally, right, let’s imagine someone’s allowed to copy a report and build their own. They could copy the report and then change it to whatever they wanted. Okay, well, I really just need this. Great. We can’t support it. It’s now on your own, , lap to support it and build what you want. But again, I think when we’re doing something like that, that now means we’re taking a wide audience report and narrowing it down to like a couple

53:34 People, right? I know what works for me and if I have color blindness around certain colors, I won’t pick them for me. That’s that’s how I’ll build it so that I like the report thing. So, there’s this idea of like general availability and I think like customizability that we need to unpack here as well is figuring out what does that look like? , and then letting , do we even let people copy things and make their own stuff? That could be another decision point that’s at the admin level. So let me just maybe propose the question of what are your thoughts on that? Does this seem to make sense? Is this Jive? Should we allow this? What do you think?

54:09 Trying to think of it from a perspective of any other standard that you might have in your organization, right? Like a branding standard for example. So if I’m building something just internally for myself, maybe I don’t have to follow the branding standards. So maybe it’s just similar to that, right? But without a policy, it’s it’s the wild west. So I guess I guess where I’m going with this is there has to be a policy otherwise we’re live. Well, and and this is I guess maybe more of my my idea is like we need at least a threshold that says if we’re doing so

54:41 This is where I think like size of audience matters to me, right? If we’re pulling out reports that’s above 5 10 people, right? If it’s going to be report that’s not just internal for the BI team. Okay, now we’re hitting the level of we need to start putting standards on things that that’s that’s a threshold by which we say we’re ready to go and do make sure everything use the accessibility checker provide the time to make the automation to make sure the report has accessibility I features and attached to it right I’m always in this Tommy and I debate this

55:13 All the time does this belong in certified data sets or not certified data sets and I’m going to argue 100% this is a certified data set thing Right? If this is one of those items that says checkbox, like if it’s going to be certified, we’re going to do this check. We’re going to make sure these things go right to the list. These are the list items that we think are important. That has to be a requirement to get into certified. And if someone comes to us with a report that says, “Hey, I’ve built this really cool looking report. Awesome. We need to do a couple refinement and tweaks to it to

55:45 Get it to a place where we’re happier about it.” Okay, I’ll I’ll pause there. getting on a high horse here at this point. I think I totally agree with you because you don’t always not everybody’s disabilities are visible and you don’t want to force people to tell you if they don’t want to, right? So we we can’t be building like oh well I know it’s just for my team or or it’s just an internal report because you don’t necessarily know if somebody has needs, right? So so we can’t

56:18 We can’t personalize it like that. we have to keep it generalized and make sure that we just have these standards in place. I I get it. But I’m also I feel like I’m I understand I want to say I I understand the sentiment because everyone’s not going to be like, “Oh yes, I can’t see reds. Put my hand up and like, , help me out.” Yeah, I totally agree with this one. But again, I this is where I I really fight the line between it does take additional effort to get to a report that actually had So again, there were

56:50 Some easy wins here. I would argue 100%. Some of the easy wins just knock them off the list. Just click a couple extra buttons, get it done, no problem. Right? Accessibility checkers that are out there now. And this is an area that I think admittedly Microsoft’s a bit weak in. Right? There should be like if we’re if the Wex standard exists, great. where where’s the integration with that standard and your report page like the assess button boop or hey you’re publishing this report like where’s so there’s there’s potentially admittedly some weakness on Microsoft’s

57:23 Given some ability to adjust these things but it’s always left up to the report developer to like take the time and the effort to do this one and again with everything we’re doing like and again Tommy and I go back and forth this all the time right there’s a lot of you could do a lot of ad columns and descriptions to everything. , , document the semantic model, make sure everything has really robust business descriptions. And how many models have I published that I don’t do that with? I just cuz it’s just getting it done quickly, getting it out the door. So again, I think this is a

57:55 Lot of we need a minimum barrier threshold to say yes, there there is a time to delivery valuation and what does your company value like? what the company has to decide these things like this is something we’re going to adhere to. We’re going to allow people to have the extra time to build these things. I feel like the pressure from the company is just make more reports and we’re like whoa the BI team’s like slow down the model’s not right. I don’t have the data I need. I got to build better stuff. And then now we’re we’re

58:28 Adding another thing on this which is well we got to run this thing through an accessibility checker. And that takes time to set up initially until it becomes part of your process. And again, the hope here is once you’ve automated it, it becomes faster, right? That that makes the sense here. But I think it’s just a it’s a fine line to balance. I think it also I agree and I also do think that paying attention to accessibility will make us all better designers overall as well because it’ll it’s going to make it’s going to force us to keep things clean and organized and simple and really be thoughtful about the colors we choose.

59:02 So these are all design principles, right? So I think it will another benefit. It’s so it’s not just extra effort. It is going to make us better report designers if we pay attention. I like that thought. Excellent thought. Can I give you guys one more very random rabbit trail on this one as well? I’m listening. Oh boy. This is this is going to take us this is going to take us somewhere wild here. Okay. have you used dark mode in PowerBI desktop by chance? Well, my answer,

59:35 Tommy. I have not been because I’ve been seeing all kinds of complaints about it. Oh, sorry. I thought you were telling Tommy to wait, but No, no, Tommy’s good. Tommy has. And then and Stephanie said is Stephanie, you don’t use dark mode in desktop, correct? No, but I see things like on Reddit about, hey, this button disappeared. And the answer is inevitably, oh, yeah, switch off dark mode. Okay. All right. So, I’m going to pick on one here. All right. So, we’re talking about accessibility. Desktop has a pretty good job in the dark mode of

60:08 Flipping back. So, there’s a high contrast. , it does absolutely kill my eyes when I’m on the report page now and the report page is white and the the whole everything else in desktop is like super dark and like, , I get it. Okay, fine. This is I think where the advent of a lot of like the dark mode reports are like starting to show up now because people are like trying to use dark mode in desktop. But if you’re on the report page and you go to the view ribbon and you go down to customize your current theme. So Stephanie, you were talking about earlier where you can set the title, , location and you can set the font. There is a standard

60:41 Set of like color classes or text classes you can go use. And it’s found under the view ribbon under all the color themes at the very bottom of the list. There’s a customize current theme inside desktop. It just cracks me up. In the place where we’re trying to build color and accessibility to things, the very menu that is trying to help you do this is literally black text on black backgrounds. And it’s almost impossible to see. And you have to hover very carefully to see like what the heck it’s doing. And I was like, okay, we we got

61:14 Really close. When you click on the text section, you can see that there’s a general title, cards, and headers, but the rest of the menu items on the lefth hand side, all black. Can’t see it, not even there. So, to to pile on your comment earlier, Stephanie, which is like stay away from dark mode for this reason. there, you’re right. I’m finding even in desktop, there’s still some rough edges around dark mode that need to be getting improved. And I’ve we’ve poked on this a couple times on the podcast and still has yet to be fixed. So maybe we’ll get a fabric

61:47 Vienna announcement of okay, the customized theme pane has been fixed and we can actually read the text in dark mode. So anyways, one more thing to pick on there a little bit. Awesome. Sounds like Tommy’s a fan though. Tommy’s using No, I honestly though too, but there’s times when I’m like what? Huh? And I have to like either feel like I need to shine a light a flashlight. So, , no, I think one thing, too, as we’ll continue to have you on. I’m intrigued. I’ve heard great stories from people who are, , , use and, , rely on accessibility tooling that are

62:22 Creating PowerBI reports, , that you would say there, you would not think there’s any way. So it’s we’ve talked a lot about the consumer today and the the end user using reports but there’s a whole other side of this too on there’s a lot of people out there with requiring the accessibility tools in their day-to-day that are building PowerBI reports and keyboard shortcuts and what’s available to us. So it’s shout out to anyone who’s listening with that because I would love to see the

62:55 Workflow. Yeah, same. That would be really cool. I feel like at some point building reports programmatically in some ways assists a little bit with being able to build more accessible reports. And I’ll maybe I’ll end on this my let’s probably do we’re probably about time. We This went actually extremely quick. I’m Wow, it went fast. So in lie of that, let’s let’s do maybe a final thoughts here and we’ll wrap around our final thoughts. So I guess my final thought here around this would be is accessibility features are inside

63:29 Desktop. Are you even aware of them? Have you have you had the conversation if you are a leader in your BI organization? What is your company’s stance on accessibility things? I think these are decisions that your organization and you as a BI leader or an admin of PowerBI should be having at least conversating with those about with your leadership and when those come up and say this is important the company must stand behind that and say we’re going to give ample time like when you when you provide an estimate to build a report okay it’s going to take me two days to build this report based

64:01 On your requirements we’re going to need to add a couple hours a half a day on the end of this to say okay now we’re going to comb through report and make sure that it’s accessible, right? So, to me, this is something that it has to be commitment at higher levels of the organization to make sure that we’re committing to these things and pushing them into our reports. , there’s a lot of easy buttons to click. We should definitely be doing those already as much as we possibly can regardless of the audience size. All right, those are my final thoughts. Stephanie, what do you think? What what wrap-up thoughts you would think about here? , I’m just going to stick I’m going to

64:34 Reiterate the the main ones for everybody so that if you’ve gotten through this and you’re just trying to remember what they were and you don’t want to go back and watch the whole thing again. Okay, so number one, tab order. Super super easy. , number two, accessible theme. , and still check your color contrast though because that’s a big one. And , number three, alt text on visuals that will be read by a screen reader. , and font size. That’s all. So those are the important ones. Do those and if we can if we can automate a little bit more, make our

65:06 Lives easier, that’s what we should go towards. I’ll also point out too a lot of community gallery contests. Oh, thank you. I wanted to bring that one up. Yes, world championships which we will see in Vienna. , I love love love that this is the second one. And one of the key criteria like of the four main criteria for these is accessible accessibility. So, , if you’re entering these contests, make sure that you you follow these practices because it’s a requirement. So, I love that

65:38 That’s a requirement of of the community contest. And you heard it here. what four to hit. Go do those, right? and then you’ll you’ll score better on the accessibility part of the report contest. So I just I’m gonna point that out because that’s again super fun, very important and again we’re trying to instill best practices in building reports. Tommy, final thoughts for you. No, I think for a lot of us just the easy lowh hanging fruit can make a huge difference for a lot of users and this is one of the things in your scoping when you meet with your

66:10 Department or whoever you represent stakeholders ask the question is there anyone I need to be aware of is there any particular accessibility that we need to account for and the first time I ever did that someone’s like yeah I’m actually color blind and I was like oh we’ve worked together for a year and you never said anything until I asked the question. So, these little things can make a really, really big difference. Awesome. Well, that being said, Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us today. We will now do the wrap. , thank you all for joining the podcast.

66:43 Hopefully, this was giving you some other insights. There’s some additional features around accessibility and working through making reports more universal for every audience, which is awesome. We want to be able to do that. The idea here is we’re communicating with our our data, with our reporting. We want to make sure that we can communicate to as many people as possible, which is very fun. That being said, we really appreciate your listenership. If you’d like to listen to this p podcast without any ads, feel free to join our membership down below. We’ve got some membership tiers as well. So, we will push all of our ads or all of our episodes adree in the members

67:17 Area. So, if you’d like to see this without any ads in it, we’ve had some complaints. You’re like, “Oh, you guys have ads and things.” I’m like, “Yeah, because we make a 10 cents. Tommy and I need Tommy I need a coffee for these things.” So, we we want to we want to promote that as well down below. So, also with there as well, go check out Stephanie on her LinkedIn page. It’s also in the description down below. Follow her stuff. She’s doing really great things here. Has some amazing tools. she’s also part of Data Witches. The What’s What’s the blog that you’re a part of? It’s it’s data witches.com. It is data witches.com. Yep.

67:49 Okay. Go check out her blog there. lots of great content, a lot of good things in there as well. also focusing on all kinds of topics. PowerBI, building reports, governance, , accessibility things, all kinds of stuff. Very good things over there on her site as well. That being said, Tommy, where else can you find the podcast? You can find us on Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. Make sure to subscribe and leave a rating. It helps us out a ton. Do you have a question, idea, or topic that you want us to talk about in a future episode? Well, head over to powerbi.tipsodcast. Leave your name and a great question.

68:21 And finally, join us live every Tuesday and Thursday, 7:30 a.m. Central, and join the conversation on all PowerB.tips social media channels. Thank you all and we’ll see you next time.

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