What to say or do about touch accessibility for date picker spin button example

In pull request 1053 that adds a date picker spin button, I have added the
following comment. I am duplicating it here to give broader exposure given
that we need to decide what to do before tomorrow's branch cut for APG 1.1
release 4.

 

I'm conflicted what to say or do about touch screen reader support. This
form of spin button implementation cannot work with touch screen readers. It
cannot be made to work until we have interactions supported by AOM.

 

However, between now and the time we can use AOM, it is possible to make a
spinbutton touch accessible by moving the increment and decrement buttons
outside the spinbutton div and then making them focusable with tabindex -1.
The downside is more clutter for desktop screen reader users. The upside is
more users have access.

 

So, should we:

 

1) Add a note stating this form of spinbutton implementation is not
accessible with touch screen readers and open an issue to address it later.

2) Change this example.

 

While we have stated in the Read Me First section that touch screen reader
support is not yet addressed by the APG, we have also been working at
avoiding increasing touch debt. This seems like a good example of a place
where we might want to avoid increasing debt.

 

The above is from pull request 1053:

https://github.com/w3c/aria-practices/pull/1053

And the spin button date picker example can be seen here:

https://raw.githack.com/w3c/aria-practices/issue125-spinbutton-datepicker-ex
ample/examples/spinbutton/datepicker-spinbuttons.html

 

Thanks!

Matt King