Accessibility for Power BI

Your responsibilities with Power BI

The Power BI suite from Microsoft is an excellent tool for the rendering of graphs, charts, and other modes to explain data for expert and non-expert users.

Like any content on your site, this is something that must be accessible for users. Even if data or reports are generated by third-parties, you are still responsible for the accessibility of this information.

In Web Services, we cannot access the administration tools for your Power BI presentations so it is hard for us to know if the reports you generate are 1) accessible and 2) meeting accessibility standards. Therefore, you must insure that your Power BI Reports are as accessible as possible, as well as being in compliance with provincial accessibility rules.

Resources

We recommend accessing the documentation on accessibility for Power BI created by Microsoft. 

They provide an overview of accessibility opportunities with Power BI

You can find a description of how to create accessible reports located on their website. 

A reminder about universal design

The accessibility tools built into Power BI mean you have a great opportunity to provide reports which are created with Universal design in mind.  Providing accessible information for users with disabilities means you are also providing that explanation potentially to all users. Good accessibility is always good usability.

For example, if you describe an outline of the trends in an economic dataset portrayed in a bar chart in order to assist those who cannot see the chart, you are also providing a summary that anyone can read and understand.