4.2.4. Mobile Layouts, Accessibility, and Personalization

💡 First Principle: A report that works only for one screen size or one kind of reader excludes people. Mobile layouts adapt content to phones; accessibility features make reports usable with keyboards and screen readers and readable for people with low vision or color blindness; personalization lets readers adjust visuals to their own questions without editing the report.

Mobile layout (View > Mobile layout in Desktop): for each page, drag visuals from the Page visuals pane onto a phone-shaped portrait canvas, resize them, and optionally format them differently for mobile. The Power BI mobile apps show this layout on phones held in portrait; if no mobile layout exists, the page appears as the desktop layout, which is hard to read. Mobile layouts share the same visuals (and data) as the web layout; they're a view, not a copy.

Accessibility design practices and features:

• Alt text on every visual (Format > General > Alt text), including dynamic alt text driven by a measure, read by screen readers.
• Tab order set in the Selection pane so keyboard users move logically; hide decorative shapes from tab order.
• Titles and labels that describe the visual; data labels instead of relying only on color.
• Color contrast of at least 4.5:1 for text, accessible themes, and not using color alone to convey meaning (add markers, patterns, or labels). Line chart markers with different shapes help distinguish series.
• Keyboard navigation and Show as table (Alt+Shift+F11) so screen-reader users can read the underlying data.
• High-contrast mode support in the service and Desktop.
• Consistent page layouts and meaningful page names.

Personalize visuals lets readers change a visual in reading view without edit permission: change the visualization type, swap a measure or dimension, add or remove a legend, compare measures, and change aggregations. Authors enable it in Options > Current file > Report settings > Personalize visuals, and can turn it on or off per page or per visual. Readers save their changes as personal bookmarks; changes don't persist automatically. Perspectives (created in TMDL view) can limit which fields readers see while personalizing, but they're not a security feature. Personalization isn't supported for publish to web.

⚠️ Exam Trap: A requirement that "readers must be able to swap the measure in a chart and change its visual type without contacting the author or receiving edit rights" is Personalize visuals, not granting Build permission or Contributor role.

Reflection Question: A report uses red and green bars to show whether stores met targets. Name two changes that make the same information accessible to a color-blind reader using a screen reader.