Press "Enter" to skip to content

Thoughts on the New Power BI Accessible Themes

Meagan Longoria is moderately pleased:

Everyone’s vision is a little different. It is rare (impossible?) that a color theme is accessible for everyone. For instance, while many people with color vision deficiency have trouble distinguishing red and green hues, others have trouble distinguishing blue hues. So when we optimize to accommodate one condition, we may make things more difficult for another condition. This happened with the change in accent color in Power BI Desktop from yellow to teal. Changing to teal increased color contrast, which was great for people with low vision, but it caused new issues for some people with color vision deficiency.

While I am very happy to see these new color themes, I hope everyone understands that they aren’t just generally accessible for all uses. As mentioned in the blog post, they specifically have better color contrast to achieve a contrast of at least 3:1, which is the contrast recommended by WCAG for non-text content.

Read the whole thing. There’s a delicate balancing act between having a complete color scheme and satisfying a variety of needs. It sounds like this theme doesn’t quite cut it, though hopefully there will be some improvements in the future.