# Accessibility in Tableau : A discussion with Ron Eisenstein

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2024-06-06
- **Format:** Video · 62 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Data visualisation, Industry trends, Community
- **Tools:** Tableau (accessibility, cloud, dashboards, formatting, pulse, server)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/accessibility-in-tableau-a-discussion-with-ron-eisenstein
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxZAsMmlRQ8

I sat down with Ron Eisenstein, an engineering team lead and long-time Tableau super-fan, to discuss accessibility in Tableau. We reframe accessibility as a core purpose of analytics tools rather than an add-on, cover features like alt text, tab ordering and keyboard navigation, and walk through one of Ron's fundraising dashboards built with accessibility best practices in mind.

## Key takeaways

- Analytics tools like Tableau are fundamentally accessibility tools for data, sitting squarely in the cognitive domain by making raw numbers digestible through aggregation and visual analytics.
- Screen readers rely heavily on tab ordering, which most authors never consider when building dashboards; editable alt text and changing the default left-to-right keyboard navigation are recent Tableau improvements.
- Pre-attentive processing matters: the brain notices luminance first, then height (above/below), then length, then slope/angle, then colour density, which is why dual encoding and decluttering shorten time to insight.
- You can test colour accessibility quickly by uploading a dashboard screenshot to a colour-blindness simulator; a simple, low-colour design tends to render almost identically across conditions.
- The Tableau Release Navigator workbook tracks new, deprecated, retired and changed features between any two versions, but accessibility features aren't tagged, so they're hard to find without deep community knowledge.

## Chapters

- 0:00 Reframing accessibility as Tableau's core purpose
- 1:56 Meeting Ron and his Tableau journey
- 8:51 Why Ron cares about accessibility
- 10:21 The COVID dashboard accessibility review
- 14:26 What accessibility actually means
- 18:30 Desktop versus web accessibility
- 22:14 AI, Pulse and the tolerance for error
- 24:46 Best practices and UI kits
- 28:50 Explaining pre-attentive processing
- 32:08 Finding accessibility in the Release Navigator
- 41:01 Walking through the fundraising dashboard
- 46:52 Democratising the big takeaway

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/accessibility-in-tableau-a-discussion-with-ron-eisenstein

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena