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Re: Datepicker questions - are they useful?

for

From: Nancy Johnson
Date: Nov 2, 2015 7:07AM

I have also struggled with date pickers. I have encouraged the
engineers to use all JQuery UI for all client-side JS needs where
possible as I know it does add the WAI-ARIA controls automatically,
which may not be totally perfect but helps.

For the date picker I stayed with allowing user to add the date to the
field directly or popping the calendar off a button.

We have so many other issues that come up from changing business
requirements at the last minute and third party add ons, to security
and data issues. A one-size-fits all solution, that I need one size
fits all.

I will look at Deques solution.

Nancy


On Mon, Nov 2, 2015 at 8:42 AM, Birkir R. Gunnarsson
< <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> A datepicker offers some things that an input field does not, such as
> the ability to quickly select a date which falls on a given day of the
> week.
> Also it gives the aplication a way to restrict the dates available
> )for some internal reason such as expiration date of offer, staff
> availability etc.) and thus minimize the chance of users dealing with
> error conditions on the form.
> Usually datepickers are offered as an optional control to date input
> fields, so this way you give the user best of both worlds.
> A key to making datepickers useful on desktop is to set them up in an
> accessible table or, better yet, offer keyboard shortcuts that quickly
> let the user explore and choose a date. After all, you do not want the
> keyboard only user to have to wear down his tabkey to get to December
> 12th, 2015 by tabbing through each date until then.
>
> One accessible datepicker implementation is available at
> https://dequeuniversity.com/resources (where you can download and play
> with the code, it is written using JQuery).
> The actual JQuery datepicker had a lot of accessibility issues last
> time I looked (that was some months ago).
> I think the 3 dropdown aproach is not bad either. As a user I have
> found that to be a safe and relatively easy option, but that is the
> opinion of a single (well, married) screen reader user. It might be a
> nightmare for people with cognitive disabilities, I don't know.
> And, yes, please use the html5 datatypes for mobile devices.
> It make a ton of difference to get the appropriate UI or keyboard
> option up when entering values in a mobile environment (such as the @
> symbol on the main keyboard for type="email"). That should be better
> for all users.
> Cheers
> -Birkir
>
>
>
> On 11/2/15, _mallory < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>> On Mon, Nov 02, 2015 at 07:56:46AM -0500, Mary Elizabeth Sullivan wrote:
>>>
>>> - is a sequence of drop downs better?
>>
>> This is the only one I can really reply to, though I also personally
>> dislike graphical date pickers (mostly because everything's too small
>> and hard to choose, though I do like *seeing* the dates on a
>> calendar), and that is:
>> please check and user-test and check again if you go for the multi-
>> dropdown route. It's physically very easy to screw these up as a user
>> since your focus stays on the input while you may now think you've
>> switched to scrolling the page. Gov.uk should have some statistics
>> on this as I recall Anna Bartlett? giving a talk about all the problems
>> they've seen with select tags.
>>
>> There's also the issue of having three inputs for what mentally we
>> consider a single value, the date. Using dropdowns is simply easier
>> for the back-end to check validity, but I can't say they're an
>> improvement for the front-end.
>>
>> _mallory
>> >> >> >> >>
>
>
> --
> Work hard. Have fun. Make history.
> > > >