Microsoft should help support users with disabilities by improving the accessibility features in Power BI export to PDF.
Currently, Power BI includes the option to add alt-text to report elements and tab order to report pages. However, those are not included when exporting to PDF, and the exported PDF lacks any tag structure to associate with those elements. The interactivity of Power BI reports is great. However, many organizations still rely on distributing PDF reports for disseminating data both internally and externally. Many organizations are also required to ensure distributed PDFs meet accessibility guidelines. In order to help customers comply with such guidelines and support users of assistive technologies, please consider the following recommendations:
1) Add the ability to add accessibility tags to objects in Power BI (Example Mockup Below). This capability is already included in Power BI Report Builder (Accessibility features in Power BI paginated reports); and
2) Ensure accessibility tags, alt-text, and tab/reading order are included when exporting to PDF from both Desktop and Service.
3 Comments
Hi Chg_Dat ,
Thanks for your feedback! If you would like to suggest feature improvements, you may vote the idea and comment here to improve this feature. It is the right place for customers provide feedback about Microsoft Office products . What’s more, if a feedback is high voted there by other customers, it will be promising that Microsoft Product Team will take it into consideration when designing the next version in the future.
Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Caitlyn- Hi is this available currently in Power BI desktop already? i can see the idea says delivered by microsoft but couldn't find tags option in Power BI desktop/service.
- Unfortunately not. I think "Delivered" means "Delivered *TO* Microsoft" not "Delivered *BY* Microsoft." I actually put a ticket in because it seemed like a defect but was told the behavior was "by design." They were nice enough about it and instead helped me translate my request into 12 independent design change requests (DCRs). So maybe it will get done. But it didn't seem like it would be high priority. In case it helps anyone, I wound up realizing that while the Tags are not present, at least the alt+text which I define in custom measures is actually exported to the PowerPoint. Unfortunately, the PowerPoint export provides poorly scaled raster images instead of vector graphics. So, I wound up exporting both a PDF and PowerPoint then combining the alt text with the vector graphics and doing the tagging with an elaborate VBA macro. Not ideal but works for now. It also overcomes the issue raised in these posts: https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/Fabric-Ideas/Allow-further-edit-capabilities-when-exporting-Power-BI-visuals/idi-p/4496236 https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/Fabric-Ideas/Export-BI-graphs-to-Edited-Power-point-presentation/idi-p/4443298 https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/Fabric-Ideas/Export-Power-bi-Report-to-Power-Point-in-editable-format/idi-p/4449069
