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Re: Datepicker questions - are they useful?

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From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Nov 2, 2015 9:05AM


> One accessible datepicker implementation is available at
> https://dequeuniversity.com/resources

Hi, as a quick question, I'm not sure what the role=grid is for on the table element. The use of role=application will activate the correct modality when focus is set within, , yet role=grid propagates the Grid roles down through all of the table markup, but since focus is being set to the A tags and not the implicit Gridcell elements, the role of Grid doesn't really do anything since the construct is already contained within a properly marked up data table already.



-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Sent: Monday, November 02, 2015 5:43 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Datepicker questions - are they useful?

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
> > > archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
> >


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