Re: date pickers

Hi David,
It is me again!
A date entry edit box is not an adequate alternative for a date picker table. I might want to travel on a Thursday or maybe the last Wednesday of next month and should be able to run down the column for the day and determine the date like everyone else.
Sighted keyboard users too might want to do the same.  Want to exclude all these users from picking a date?
- The date picker icon should be accessible 
- The table should be accessible (only cells that contain day of week) should have TH as it is a simple table. Also ensure first row of table does not contain non-data table content like month selector elements etc. (Scope is not supported by all AT so I recommend use of scope only when absolutely necessary). 
- The month selector (next/prev) and 
- The actual dates. The date should be a link if it is selectable or just text if not. Activating the date link should populate the edit box. 
Out of the box pickers seldom meet these specs I suggest to the many sites I review.
All this is attainable using standard HTML.
 Trust this helps.
Sailesh Panchang
Centreville VA 
Tel 571-344-1765
www.deque.com

--- On Sun, 7/3/11, David MacDonald <david100@sympatico.ca> wrote:


From: David MacDonald <david100@sympatico.ca>
Subject: date pickers
To: "'WCAG'" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Date: Sunday, July 3, 2011, 5:13 PM






I'd like some opinions ... I’m evaluating a lot of sites these days with date pickers... I’ve been making all the customary recommendations, using headers/id’s or scope and <th> etc....
 
But I’m actually starting to rethink this... technically if there is another way to pick the date such as direct entry MM/DD/YYYY or drop down combo box, there is a good argument that a popup date picker does not have to be compliant, since there is an alternative way to achieve the result
 
I've seen attempts to make accessible date pickers, mostly created by visual folks, in the experimental space.
 
But I've never seen a successful date picker that has caught on... I don’t know, it's such a visual kind of thing, looking at a calendar table... so far, I've yet to hear about any popup date picker that blind folks like, or that is more useful than just entering the date directly or using combo boxes...
 
What do you think? Do you think I should be fighting to get sites to accessify their pop up date pickers, in addition to either drop down combo boxes or entering dates directly MM/DD/YYYY? If so, does anyone know of an out of the box accessible one that I can recommend...?
 
Cheers
David MacDonald

Received on Sunday, 3 July 2011 22:03:54 UTC