RE: Accessible Interactive Calendar recommendations

As I commented on Dennis’s article, most of those are totally inaccessible (at least for screen reader users) and there are issues with the only two that are usable at all. In fact, the more I test them, the more issues I find.

I have tested lots of other date pickers too, but none are any better. Right now, my view is that there are none that you can just pick up and use, and most are not even fixable. The Deque and Whatsock ones might be fixable but I certainly don’t have the skills to do that.

The problem is compounded by the fact that their behaviour varies greatly depending on not only which screen reader mode you navigate with inside the date picker (i.e. forms mode or virtual cursor mode), but it can also vary depending on how you entered the date picker (i.e. whether you tabbed in or used the arrow keys). There are a surprising number of variations that need to be tested.

I have no doubt that some of the erroneous behaviours are caused by bugs in the assistive technologies rather than by incorrect coding, but my view is that developers have a responsibility to provide solutions that work with the currently available assistive technologies. It’s not satisfactory to say the code is fine because it would work with bug-free assistive technologies that don’t actually exist yet.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


From: Jennifer Sutton [mailto:jsuttondc@gmail.com]
Sent: 01 December 2017 23:33
To: w3c-wai-ig <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Accessible Interactive Calendar recommendations


WAI folks:



Here's a collection of date-pickers that Dennis  Lembree put together at one time. Hope it helps/gets you pointed in the right direction. See:



http://www.webaxe.org/accessible-date-pickers/




If folks have more to recommend, feel free to comment on his post (and here, too, of course).



And for good measure, here's an article from Smashing Magazine that's about these, generally, rather than being accessibility-centric:



https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/07/designing-perfect-date-time-picker/




I double-checked Heydon Pickering's Inclusive components site, which lots of folks seem to be enjoying of late, but he hasn't worked on this component, yet:

https://inclusive-components.design




Best,

Jennifer



On 12/1/2017 10:42 AM, Kelly Childs wrote:
Hi All,

Does anyone have a full accessible interactive calendar they recommend?

Thanks!

--
Kelly Childs
ADA Compliance & Graphic Support Manager

888.750.4556, option 7

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