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Re: Datepicker questions - are they useful?

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From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Nov 3, 2015 12:23PM

One thing that is important to keep in mind, is that there is no such thing as 100% accessibility. No matter what you do, there is always going to be a percentage of people who have difficulty with whatever it is. The reason being that there is no way to predict all types and variations of disabilities for all people at the same time, and all such have different ways and technologies for accessing these technologies. Also, there are many who have such disabilities who don't have access to these technologies at all, and nothing will allow them to access these features without them.

So it's a mistake to not recommend something because it is not 100% accessible to all people equally.

That being said, we as developers can raise the bar as high as possible, and staple it there, so that others can learn from and build new and better technologies from such benchmarks in the future.

This is the concept that I used to build the WhatSock date picker, so that others might learn from and benefit from the research that went into its construction, and use it if they desire.

As technologies change, better solutions are likely to evolve as ATs improve and API mappings become better synchronized with browsers and so on, so all of these technologies will evolve with them as time goes on. It's doubtful however that such simple constructs as the one I've been referencing will just stop working though, since it uses the most basic of concepts to comprise it's functionality. Even so, specs change and sometimes events are deprecated, and widgets need to be updated accordingly. The trick for managing this is to modularize components like this so they can be easily updated and just plugged back into the application without disrupting functionality.

Luckily styling and content display is easy to change using CSS, so it's also important to understand the difference between the functional accessibility of an interactive widget versus how it looks, which are very different. E.G If something simply doesn't look right, it can easily be changed. If something is programmed inaccessibly however, it is often much harder to fix no matter what it looks like.

Please do me a favor and test the WhatSock date picker when you have time and let me know which accessibility issues you encounter. I can usually fix them very quickly when discovered. Also, for any control like this, the type of device will often affect its usability, which can't be avoided. For example you can view something on a monitor or tablet with ease, but try to do the same on a 2 inch wide iPod screen and it will likely be impossible to interact with. We haven't figured out a foolproof way of dealing with all devices equally as yet, but this should get easier as time goes on and responsive design techniques improve.

All the best,
Bryan