Building an Accessible Datepicker Component in React
What is Web Accessibility?
Web accessibility, also known as a11y, is the design, creation, and coding of websites and web tools that can be used by everyone. Unfortunately, many sites and tools today have accessibility barriers that pose challenges to some users. To build a more accessible web, it’s essential to put accessibility at the forefront of product development.
WCAG Guidelines and Resources
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provide shared standards for creating accessible sites and tools that meet the needs of individuals, organizations, and governments internationally. You can find checklists from The A11Y Project, Wuhcag, and WebAim based on the WCAG that you can use as a reference point when building accessible products.
Prerequisites and Setup
Before we begin building the datepicker component, ensure you have Node, Yarn or npm installed on your machine. We will be using create-react-app to bootstrap our project. You can use any of the three available options to create your project.
Installing Additional Dependencies
We will require a few libraries to help us build our datepicker component, including date-fns for manipulating dates, react-fontawesome for icons, lodash to manipulate some data, and react-axe, which tests your application for accessibility and reports findings directly to the console while developing and debugging.
Component Setup
Our datepicker application will have three constituent components: the app component, the datepicker component, and the calendar component. We will focus on making the component accessible through the use of appropriate contrast, keyboard navigation, and Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA).
The App Component
The app component will render the datepicker component and the calendar component conditionally based on boolean values in state. We will have two Boolean values in state, showDatepicker and showCalendar, to toggle the datepicker and calendar visibility respectively.
The Datepicker Component
The datepicker component will show text prompting the user to select a date and the currently selected date. It will receive date and handleSelect props to show the current date and to toggle calendar visibility respectively.
The Calendar Component
When the calendar component is complete, it should display a grid that starts off displaying the month of the currently selected date and can be navigated to different dates. We will create a table that will only have the names of days of the week for now.
Generating Days of the Month
We need to know how many days there are in the month and on what day the first and last days fall. If there are any days before the first day from the previous month or after the last day from the next month for that week, we will need to add empty values to fill out the week.
Keyboard Navigation
We will define some additional rules for navigating the calendar using keyboard keys, including left, right, up, down, Page Up, and Page Down.
Final Touches
That’s it! We have built an accessible datepicker component in React. Next steps include adding prop validation, breaking down the calendar component into smaller children components, and experimenting with different color combinations and contrast ratios.
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