Everyone, rejoice 🙌

Georges livestreamed himself reviewing and merging accessibility contributions in GNOME Calendar again, specifically the entirety of merge request !564, which introduces keyboard-navigable month cells. This means, as of GNOME 50, GNOME Calendar's month view will be fully navigable with a keyboard for the first time in its history! The only high-level goal that needs work now is conveying these information with assistive technologies properly.

Do note that the screen recording attached won't have any alt text, to avoid redundancy. Everything written below is a detailed explanation of the experience, and the recording is essentially a visual demonstration:

- When tabbing between events, focus moves chronologically. This means that focus continues to move down until there are no event widgets overlaying the current cell. Then, focus moves to the topmost event widget in the next cell or row. Tabbing backwards with Shift+Tab moves in the opposite direction.
- On the last event widget, pressing Tab moves the focus to the adjacent month cell. Conversely, pressing Ctrl+Tab on any event widget has the same effect.
- Pressing an activation button (such as Enter or Space) displays the popover for creating an event. Additionally, pressing and holding the Shift key while pressing the arrow keys selects every cell between the start and end positions until the Shift key is released, which displays the popover with the selected range.

Both merge requests !564 and !598 took us almost an entire year to explore various approaches and finally settle on the best one for our use case. Everything was done voluntarily, relying solely on support from donors and those who share these posts, without any financial backing from other entities. In contrast, most, if not all, calendar apps backed by trillion-dollar companies still don't offer proper keyboard navigation across their views. In many cases, they haven't even reached feature parity. If it is not too much trouble, please consider funding my accessibility work on GNOME. Thank you! ♥️

#GNOMECalendar #GNOME #Accessibility #a11y #Calendar #GTK #libadwaita #OpenSource #FreeSoftware #FOSS #OSS #Linux