Hi Carl!
Thanks so much for your suggestion! I'm forwarding your suggestions on
to the fluid-work mailing list so that the developers can review them.
Thanks again,
Allison
On Feb 3, 2009, at 1:05 PM, Carl Forde wrote:
Allison, here's an ugly hack and kludge that might get you part of the
way. Rather than using a table, you could use a series of <a>, with
floats and widths assigned so they flow the right way. Now here's the
ugly part ( ha, you were thinking that was the ugly part ) all the <a>
use a common background sprite suitably offset and cropped to show the
right day number. Each one would have an TITLE attribute defined that
would provide the correct date interpretation. I think this would
handle your first two concerns. Perhaps for the non-selectable dates
you could use a <p> with a different sprite that has some colour added
to it to visually distinguish these dates from the selectable ones?
Does that help? Even make sense?
Carl
On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 11:53 AM, Allison Bloodworth
<[email protected]> wrote:
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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--
Start by doing what's necessary;
then do what's possible;
and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
-- Saint Francis of Assisi
Allison Bloodworth
Senior User Interaction Designer
Educational Technology Services
University of California, Berkeley
(415) 377-8243
[email protected]
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