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@cathybaptista cathybaptista commented Aug 19, 2024

Summary

Removed the leading numbers from the month options in the memorable date component. Recent usability testing indicated that having both numbers and names to represent months was confusing for screen reader users.

Breaking change

This is not a breaking change.

Related issue

Closes #5910

Related pull requests

Changelog uswds/uswds-site#2787

Preview link

Preview link: Memorable Date preview

Problem statement

The desired state for the memorable date component is that there is only one option for the values in the months dropdown (either numbers or month names) so that users can search by typing in the month name. The current state is that both the number and the month name are included in the option dropdown, which means users cannot search by the month name.

Solution

The solution is to remove the numbers from the memorable date component option dropdown. Another approach was to make both options (numbers AND month names) available, but the risk of this approach did not outweigh the rewards. The team decided that including month names is the best way to resolve this accessibility issue.

Testing and review

  1. Opened federalist link and inspected source.
  2. Verify that the id="date_of_birth_month" options do not include a number.
  3. Opened the component in production.
  4. Verify that the id="date_of_birth_month" options includes a number.
  5. Verify that if you tab to the memorable date month field and hit the first letter of each month on the keyboard the correct month appears.
  6. Verify that the correct code appears on uswds-site for this component when the "component code" button is selected. This code should not include numbers.

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@mejiaj mejiaj left a comment

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Confirming I can navigate using keyboard more easily. Thanks Cathy!

uswds-memorable-date-6028.webm

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@mahoneycm mahoneycm left a comment

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Searching by name is working for me! I think this will clear up a lot of the confusion.

Thanks @cathybaptista !

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@amyleadem amyleadem left a comment

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Thanks for making this update @cathybaptista. The code update looks good!

Quick request before approval: Can you update the summary in the PR description to be a bit more succinct? We try to pull that PR summary into the release notes and the current one is a bit too long to be useful in that context. If desired, we can move the additional information that is currently in the "summary" section down to the "solution" section.

I'm thinking something like this should work (Feel free to edit):

Removed the leading numbers from the month options in the memorable date component. Recent usability testing indicated that having both numbers and names to represent months was confusing for screen reader users.

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Oh, one more thought: I believe we wouldn't mark this as a breaking change in the description, since nothing will technically break if the user doesn't change anything. Instead, we mark this as just a markup change. See the release notes for examples of other non-breaking markup changes.

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mejiaj commented Aug 28, 2024

Moving the original issue back to In progress to capture requested changes @amyleadem mentioned.

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Looks good to me! Thanks @cathybaptista

Moved the issue to FFR

@thisisdano thisisdano merged commit aa4fc23 into develop Oct 3, 2024
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@thisisdano thisisdano deleted the cb-memorable-date-input-options branch October 3, 2024 03:40
@thisisdano thisisdano mentioned this pull request Oct 4, 2024
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USWDS - Memorable date: Input options don't meet some users expectations
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