janeway
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BirkbeckCTP
Make Dates more readable
Dates are all over our pages - articles, news items, citations, data... etc.
Dates are not consistently interpreted by screen readers, there are variations between how a US and UK citizen might interpret them (day and month ordering) and they cause readability issues - unlike a character within a word, a digit within a number can't often be determined from context.
When dates are written as numbers separated by punctuation, e.g. 10-11-2024 or 2024-11-10 this is immediately visibly identifiable as a date, even if there might be US/UK confusion over whether it was the 10th of November or the 11th of October. When read aloud, his recognition that it is a date doesn't happen until one is part was through the number as the above examples are read as numbers e.g. "ten eleven two-thousand and twenty-four". Even with all punctuation being read "ten hyphen eleven hyphen two-thousand and twenty-four" the date is part read before any recognition is possible.
In short, dates rely upon typographical symbols to provide important context, making them effectively non-text content WCAG 1.1
Consider: Either dates are written in full as suggested by the UK Gov approach (below) or there needs to be some markup at least for screenreaders. My preferred solution is to write them in full, because that makes them unambiguous across the board.
