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Re: Accessible Datepicker & NVDA Support

for

From: Mike Barlow
Date: May 22, 2016 2:55PM

Bryan - Although, after my previous posting on this topic, I notice that
there is an "aria-practices" document that has the "recommended(?)"
keyboard interaction for a Date Picker Widget that was put up by the W3C -
https://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria-practices/#datepicker (though I still
maintain that Alt-Y and Alt-M could be used to allow a user to edit the
month/year of a date)

*Mike Barlow*
Web Application Developer
Web Accessibility/Section 508 SME

Lancaster, Pa 17601
Office: 732.835-7557
Cell: 732.682.8226
e-mail: <EMAIL REMOVED>

On Sun, May 22, 2016 at 4:41 PM, Mike Barlow < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Bryan, nice looking Date Picker but one thing I would probably do would be
> to add a couple of other keyboard shortcuts and enhancements:
> Alt-Y - Puts you into a "Year" field where the year is displayed and allow
> you to enter a specific year (for example if I have to "Alt-PageDown" from
> 2016 to 1950 that's a lot of keystrokes
> Alt-M - Same for a "Month" field.
>
> And is there any "standard" way (other than simply putting the
> instructions on the page) to inform a user what the keyboard shortcuts are
> for a particular custom widget like this?
>
> *Mike Barlow*
> Web Application Developer
> Web Accessibility/Section 508 SME
>
> Lancaster, Pa 17601
> Office: 732.835-7557
> Cell: 732.682.8226
> e-mail: <EMAIL REMOVED>
>
> On Sun, May 22, 2016 at 3:51 PM, Bryan Garaventa <
> <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
>> Thanks, that does help.
>>
>> I see what you mean about the date format, though this is challenging
>> because this is totally customizable in the setup, where a developer can
>> literally do whatever they wish, such as "Saturday March 15, 2018",
>> "2017-03-15", "03/15/2017", or anything else, and this can be tied to
>> individual select elements for Month Day and Year, or to an edit field such
>> as this. So writing an algorithm to predict anything a developer wants to
>> do is impossible. That being said though, it is possible to manually set a
>> date within the datepicker JavaScript object, so I can write instructions
>> for doing this with a test page. Also putting a placeholder with the date
>> string format would probably help, so I'll change this later this week.
>>
>> Regarding the keystrokes, it is true there are a lot, yet this difficulty
>> will be the same for all date pickers out there. I'll look into adding a
>> help icon that can be used to pop these open, which should help.
>>
>> I'll look into the other observations too, there is likely a way at
>> present to control the datepicker from the edit field now, though I will
>> need to build this from scratch. Even if I do this though, users still
>> will not automatically know what all of the keystrokes are accept through
>> trial and error, the same as all such datepickers out there.
>>
>> FYI, you can scan through the years by holding down Alt+PageUp or
>> Alt+PageDown.
>>
>>
>> Bryan Garaventa
>> Accessibility Fellow
>> SSB BART Group, Inc.
>> <EMAIL REMOVED>
>> 415.624.2709 (o)
>> www.SSBBartGroup.com
>>
>>