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What are those new buttons under tab order in Power BI?

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If you’ve visited the Tab order area of the Selection Pane in Power BI in the last couple of months, you might have noticed some new buttons.

The selection pane in Power BI desktop with Tab order selected. There are three buttons underneath the Tab order heading.
Three new buttons for managing tab order in Power BI

The hover text on the first button says “Expand All”. This button is useful if you have grouped visuals. Groups are indicated by a carat to the left of the item in the tab order list.

The selection pane with tab order showing. The fourth item is a group titled Summary Cards. The items within the group are not shown.
Tab order for a report page containing one group

Selecting the Expand all button shows the individual objects within a group.

The selection pane with tab order showing. The fourth item is a group titled Summary Cards. The items within the group are shown in an indented list under the group name.
Tab order with the group expanded

The second button is the Collapse All button. It will collapse the groups so only the name of the group is shown and not the individual objects within the group.

The third button is a great new addition: Have tab order match visual order.

The Selection pane is shown with Tab order selected. The third button has hover text that reads "Have tab order match visual order".
The option to have tab order match visual order is the third button under Tab order.

This button will set the tab order for the visuals on the page to sort ascending by Y and then X coordinates. Let’s look at an example.

I have a report page containing 7 textboxes.

A Power BI report page with a box in the top left corner and a grid of 6 boxes underneath, spanning the entire width of the report. The order of the boxes appears random, but it matches the order in which they were added to the page.
The X,Y coordinates of each box are shown in the box. The original tab order is indicated by the numbers in the circle.

After clicking the button to have tab order match visual order, the tab order is changed shown below.

A Power BI report page with a box in the top left corner and a grid of 6 boxes underneath, spanning the entire width of the report. The order of the boxes matches the Y and X coordinates of each visual, starting at the top left and moving down to the bottom right.
Tab order set with the top left visual being first and the bottom right visual being last

This is often the correct tab order that matches how we read the report visually. This little button can increase keyboard/screen reader accessibility in one second instead of taking a couple of minutes per page.

There will be times that this tab order will not be what you want. Some exceptions might be when you use visuals that have a different amount of space inside the visual container, so the containers are intentionally misaligned (according to the X,Y coordinates) in order for the content to appear visually aligned. Then you might need to customize your tab order a bit. Another exception might be if you have some buttons or links at the top right of the report page that you want a user to visit last (after the content of the report). In that case, you would customize your tab order to make the button last.

But the majority of the time, this option to make tab order match visual order is exactly what you need. I applaud the Power BI team for taking this step to make creating accessible reports a little easier.

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