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Re: Acessibility of a date picker?

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: May 26, 2016 7:59AM

That is precisely what we did with the Deque calendar widget in fact.
It was developed in late 2014, and it was necessary back then, screen
readers would not consistently go into forms mode.
I did a test more recently, and the grid role caused Jaws and NVDA
with IE and FF to go into application/forms mode, so it appears that
the application role is no longer needed (though it might still be
acceptable for backward compatibility).
And, yeah, it does make some sense that aria-readonly attribute on a
grid prevents Jaws from going into forms mode.



On 5/26/16, Jonathan Avila < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>> The table with role="grid" has aria-readonly="true" which is probably what
>> is preventing screen readers from going into forms mode.
>
> One additional thing many accessible date pickers use is the role of
> application to force Windows screen readers into forms mode. Generally we
> don't recommend this type of behavior but in some cases it may be needed.
> From my experience NVDA and Firefox seem to go into forms/focus mode when
> you focus a grid but as Birkir mentions with JAWS and Firefox JAWS will not
> go into forms mode when aria-readonly is set to true. If it is not set to
> true then JAWS will go into forms mode on a grid. So there would appear to
> be differences between ATs and perhaps browsers as well -- so that may be
> why in the past people resorted to wrapping the grid with role of
> application.
>
> Jonathan
>
> Jonathan Avila
> Chief Accessibility Officer
> SSB BART Group
> <EMAIL REMOVED>
> 703.637.8957 (Office)
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