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Re: does datepicker have to be accessible

for

From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Date: Feb 12, 2011 12:39PM

On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 7:14 PM, adam solomon
< <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> With all due respect to the needs of those who require accessible sites, one
> has to be practical. The level of accessibility on the web in general is
> pretty low. I think the addition of a datepicker is one of the last things
> we should be making a fuss about. Despite the fact that accessible web sites
> shouldn't come at a high expense, the reality is that companies who are
> implementing accessibility are spending a lot of money on it. Just to take
> an example, our department contracted out a large (not gigantic) web app to
> be developed. After the contract was finished, they thought about
> accessibility, and the company which received the contract wanted an extra
> $10,000 to make it accessible. That comes out of taxpayer money. I am all
> for implementing accessibility, but at some point we have to consider the
> cost, if only to avoid a situation where high costs provide ammunition to
> those who would torpedo the cause altogether.

Your anecdote is likely an illustration of the expense of retrofitting
a quality that needs to permeate an entire system as opposed to a mere
feature, not the intrinsic cost of accessibility. It would also be
expensive to retrofit security if that had not been considered during
the design phase.

If the date picker has not been built yet, there's no good reason not
to pick an accessible implementation.

There's a usability gap if users are presented with controls they
cannot use in the DOM.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis