Design question re: Date Picker - displaying dates in next/previous months in current month's grid

[Allison Bloodworth]

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
abloodworth at berkeley.edu




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