Date picker accessibility for screen reader

[stevengore]

Are there any plans to improve the date picker accessibility for screen readers? Right now if you tab through each day in the calendar using the keyboard, the day and month are not ready by the screen reader.

[mgol]

Thanks for the report. Does the issue you describe exist when jQuery UI 1.12.1 is used or only with jQuery UI 1.13.0 or newer?

[fnagel]

@stevengore We are not planning on any a11y fixes at this point.

Given limited team resources it's not likely to be fixed by the UI team; see the project status at https://blog.jqueryui.com/2021/10/jquery-maintainers-update-and-transition-jquery-ui-as-part-of-overall-modernization-efforts/.

PRs are welcome if they're not too complex.

You can try using the never released calendar / datepicker rewrite but I would not recommend it: https://github.com/jquery/jquery-ui/tree/datepicker/demos/datepicker