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I'm a screen reader user and, hands down, date pickers are the controls which cause the most frustration for me on the web because of their almost universal lac
by jscholes 8y ago
I'm a screen reader user and, hands down, date pickers are the controls which cause the most frustration for me on the web because of their almost universal lack of accessibility. In some cases, far too many to be considered reasonable, I've been unable to complete a booking or similar process because I simply can't choose a date. But yet, in an article about creating the perfect control, accessibility is barely even mentioned, certainly not in any menaingful enough way to actually create an accessible one.
> Making one of those date pickers accessible isn’t trivial, because date selection should be keyboard-accessible and you would need to toggle between open and collapsed states. You can find an overview of accessible date pickers. Also, consider looking into Whatsock’s examples.
Great. An important topic reduced into a paragraph which sounds like it was written during the planning stage of the article and never expanded on.
- tabtab 8y agoHow would you prefer such a control handle both textual input of date, but also support a visual "pop-up" calendar widget for those who want it? Is the main problem the lack of standard conventions and consistency for the selecting input method, or is it having no known textual input option? Our organization is interested in improving our accessibility without sacrificing the convenience of modern GUI widgets, and finding it really tricky and expensive to get both. We are not made of cash, and the problem frustrates everyone.
- taeric 8y agoI'm fond of a little icon that I have to click to get the popup. If I just mouse into a field, I don't like it to auto expand anything around it.
- TomK32 8y agoFirefox does that automatically these days if you set the input's type to date.
- tabtab 8y agoBut if you have to target multiple browser brands, that's probably not a practical solution. A JavaScript library is more likely to be consistent across browsers. I don't like relying on 3rd party JavaScript gizmos, but it may be the least of evils.
- jscholes 8y agoI'd be more than happy to discuss this further with you or your organisation. Feel free to get in touch, my email is in my profile.
- robocat 8y agoFor date selection, I use a standard <input type=text>, and a dropdown icon to the right of that covered by an invisible <input type=date tabindex=-1>, with JavaScript for validation and syncing the two inputs. This: 1. Works well with tabbing (especially problematic on iOS which populates a blank input with today's date on "tabbing" through) 2. Allows user to type in date 3. Allows user to use the browser native date picker 4. Can be made to work progressively 5. Allows user to type in date even if browser has broken support for type=date (still a common problem).
- RobertRoberts 8y agoDoes the browser's built in date picker work well with accessibility? I would assume so, but since I only have to follow rules and not use a screen reader, I'd like to know how the actual experience is. I have moved to using only the browser's built in date picker, living with the limitations for benefit of future proofing.