Hi everyone,
As we are wrapping up the storyboards, wireframes, & storycards, we
have run into one last design question about the the Date Picker that
touches on coding and accessibility, and hope folks on the list can
offer some advice.
Ideally, we'd like to show dates in in the next and previous months
that overlap into the current month's grid (see the date pickers near
the bottom of this page: http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Date+Picker+Storyboard+-+Date+and+Time+Separate+Fields+with+Default)
. This allows users to more easily put the current month within the
context of the next and previous months, and provides them with more
potentially clickable links (instead of blank boxes), which will in
some instances reduce the need to navigate between months.
However, there are several potential issues we see with this:
1) Screen readers may read the dates as being within the wrong month.
Talking with Mike Elledge, if the dates are in a table he advises us
that the screen reader will read something like "Feb 2008 tuesday 1."
If we show Jan 31st in the same grid, it may in accurately read "Feb
2008 Monday 31." Is there a way to set up the table so it reads
properly, or perhaps not use tables at all?
2) Will there be issues with folks with cognitive disabilities not
understanding that the 31 is not part of February? Is there any way
other than completely removing the numbers for next/previous months to
alleviate this problem?
3) We haven't come up with a great design solution to strongly
distinguish non-selectable dates (e.g. when entering a Due Date for an
assignment, dates *before* the Open Date shouldn't be selectable) and
dates in the previous month. Currently we have them both as the same
gray, but the difference is on mouse-over the non-selectable dates do
not receive a blue highlight. We do think we should provide different
CSS classes to these cells so that different styling *can* be used,
but in our design we don't see it as being very meaningful to use
different colors of gray (which is sort of the standard for both dates
in the next/previous month *and* non-selectable dates).
Do folks have any advice on these issues?
Thanks very much!
Allison & Erin
Allison Bloodworth
Senior User Interaction Designer
Educational Technology Services
University of California, Berkeley
(415) 377-8243
[email protected]
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