Control Hub wins the SF Design Week Award for accessible data visualization colors

Accessibility and best experience for all

One of the foundational requirements for IT administrators in the new hybrid workplace is to provide employees with intuitive and feature-rich collaboration technologies to meet, call, message, share content, and collaborate no matter if they are working from the office or remotely. This can be challenging for IT admins as employees often use their own devices, home networks, and peripherals such as webcams and microphones while they’re working from home. Control Hub is the central interface to manage, analyze and secure your Webex services, and provide your employees with great performance and reliability.

Accessible colors for data visualization

I am beyond excited to share that Control Hub won the SF Design Week Award for providing accessible visualization colors in its analytics dashboards. We believe in accessibility and strive to create the best possible experience for all. We continue to focus on making Webex available to everyone – especially employees with disabilities. People with vision, hearing, or mobility disabilities have different needs, so at Webex, our goal is to create inclusive experiences that can adapt to everyone.

Control Hub provides a single console and easy access to real-time analytics for all Webex services – Meetings, Messaging, Calling, and Devices. It enables you to recognize adoption trends, understand the pain points and friction areas in your organization, and proactively plan for improvement. Control Hub Analytics shows the usage, adoption, and performance information through charts and other visual cues. Chart colors are informational; they’re visual cues to recognize dates. However, not everyone sees colors – globally, nearly 300 million people are color blind.

Control Hub delivers seamless collaboration experience

With this in mind, we defined accessible chart colors as the foundation for our design system to maximize accessibility for color-blind users to ensure a great admin experience for all. We now have three sets of chart colors implemented with a color differentiation success rate of 91.6-94.6% from color blind people. Based on the same tests, these numbers are 7-15% higher than other chart colors. Our color-blind admin users now have a visual chart language and can leverage Control Hub to deliver a consistent, seamless collaboration experience for their organization.