Not Accessible

[brad-provident]

Pretty much impossible to use this without a mouse. Tabbing between fields doesn't work. You cannot use the keyboard to enter the picker (tried tabbing, arrows, space key, and return). Focus only enters the picker if there is a default date as the value. Even then, there is no way to use the keyboard to get to the year, month, or "today" buttons.

Given the almost universal need for ADA compliance (at least in the U.S., to not get sued), this is very important. Yes, you can still type a date, but you can't access the picker that is shown to others. And most importantly, it seems to swallow the tabs so that you can't even get to the rest of the page with the keyboard.

The up and down arrow key to get to previous or next days is also an odd choice. Given that the days are side-by-side mostly, I would have expected right and left arrow keys to go that, and let the up and down keys change advance or decrement the weeks. It is weird to press the down arrow expecting the focus to be moved down, and having it moved to the left instead.

I'm not an accessibility expert, but I would suggest these shortcuts:

• tab to move to next field/link/tabindex=0/etc.
• show picker automatically when you enter the field (as you do now)
• left arrow for previous day, right arrow for next day
• up arrow for previous week (7 days earlier), down arrow for next week
• "M" to temporarily open and focus the month menu, escape or pick a month (with arrows and space key) to close it and move focus back to the text field.
• "Y" to temporarily open and focus the year menu, escape or pick a year (with arrows and space key) to close it and move focus back to the text field. And actually, it ideally shouldn't limit you to the range of 1890 - 2037 (Chrome's native picker doesn't).
• "T" to select today's date.
• delete key to revert to the original default value.
• space key to hide/show the picker (but you could still allow the other keys to work to change the value).

[Spetnik]

The issue about the year limits is valid (not that the others aren't!). The comment next to the hard-coded "1890" says "oldest person alive born in 1894". But who said we are only collecting birth dates for living people (or birth dates at all)?