hmmm, have you tried Fantastical?

I find on windows the original outlook classic calendar is nice. But otherwise iOS/Mac calendar is actually nicer. Outlook Classic would be more than you need, but it does let you look at multiple calendars at once.

@chikim <sigh> There's been a bug open about making the Thunderbird calendar keyboard accessible for literally 17 years.

@chikim Oh wow, you serious? Well, it's semi-accessible, so that's good I guess.

@mcourcel @chikim That's actually more than I expected. I genuinely didn't even try it given how long that bug has been open.

@chikim Hehehe lol, yeah I don't blame you. I mean, I can accept calendar invites, look at them, edit them. The only part that isn't accessible is the snooze function where you can choose how long before it bugs you again.

@mcourcel @chikim Can you actually navigate the calendar properly? Like arrow around the days, move by week, go to specific date, easily move from a day to the list of items that day, etc.?

@chikim @mcourcel: @Matthew2468 suggested I try Fantastical. It's actually much better than pretty much anything else I've tried, but it has two very annoying bugs/quirks I've discovered so far. First, sometimes you have to shift+tab several times to get between the item list and the calendar itself. Second, the go to date dialog won't let you type a date; you have to pick one using day, month and year lists, which is horribly inefficient.

@chikim You'd think that 17 years might be enough for progress, but what do I know. lol!

@mcourcel @chikim Sadly, I don't work for the Mozilla entity that does Thunderbird. Otherwise, I'd probably push to get this prioritised or end up fixing it myself. But if I did that now, it'd be entirely on my own time.

@chikim Yeah, same here, just listview.

@chikim Yup, I hear ya.

@chikim @mcourcel
@flexibits can this be looked at? this is feedback regarding Fantastical for Windows.

@chikim @mcourcel @Matthew2468 Blah, discovered a third critical bug: the time picker is inaccessible when entering or editing items. FML.

@chikim @mcourcel adding the team on here so they know.

@chikim @mcourcel
@flexibits

@chikim @mcourcel I can get by using Google Calendar for work. It's ugly, but I can get it to work reasonably well for the most part. The problems for me relate to trying to juggle multiple calendars - work, personal, family - at once.

@mcourcel Honestly, I don’t know how other blind professionals survive without an accessible calendar nowadays. Considering how few accessible solutions available, people don’t seem to care for it? I can’t imagine functioning without one. I guess I can write everything down in Notepad. lol

@chikim @mcourcel That's pretty much 99% of so-called accessible apps these days :(

@mcourcel 100%yes! Workflow and usability are definitely parts of accessibility, not just screen reader readability and keyboard focussability. lol Even if you can navigate to every control and read every state, an interface can still be incredibly annoying and inefficient to use.

@chikim It's gotten better, but it's definitely not efficient. I still think there's this concept of accessibility where, if you can tab through it, then it's accessible. No, it's just annoying. Or, there will be keyboard shortcuts, but they're not intuitive.

@mcourcel @Lottie @chikim I don't agree. Agents and assistants are anything but efficient right now, and with the popular focus on human appearance and friendliness over brevity and context sensitivity, I don't see that changing any time soon. The "AI will solve everything" camp has been banging on about how AI will solve all the accessibility problems with very little actual substance for years now. AI absolutely allows us to work around certain barriers, but I'm not convinced it can (or should) be the recommended solution for decent accessibility going forward. IMO, promoting that as an overall solution just entrenches and reinforces existing ableism and discrimination.

@chikim @mcourcel This is the hope of agent

@mcourcel @chikim Wow, it’s 6 am here so I’m not even going to begin to unpack and respond to them many different points in your reply. What I would say is that you’re living in the past and not facing up to the current and very soon to be future reality. This common criticism of AI explaining why it hasn’t and won’t and will never solve accessibility is tired and old now. You need to remember that the thing we can’t do is to see and we’re trying to see things other people can see. We don’t need cold fusion a cure for cancer digit cuddle God or Superintelligence. In this example, we just need to be able to look at the calendar.

@chikim @Lottie @mcourcel@allovertheplace.c If you're talking specifically about access to a calendar, I might agree we might get there eventually, though I still think we're a decent way off. But as a wider, blanket statement that AI can or should solve all accessibility issues in place of products actually bothering to make things accessible by design, I do not think that is a sustainable path forward, at least not before everyone's interface is agentic. While we have a world where some users have an intentionally designed interface vs other users being relegated to some imperfect AI, we have inequality and ableism. If everyone had the same experience, I agree it's different at that point.

@chikim My problem is in this reply. It feels like sounds like you’re talking as if this is a long way off in the future.

@chikim Why didn’t you manage your AI coding agent to fix that problem that you talked about? That had been there for 17 years in the time it’s taken between these two toots?

@chikim @mcourcel Indeed, calendars are probably the biggest thing i'm missing accessibility-wise on Windows, and seemingly on Mac too. I've got like 6 calendars I need to keep track of, and no Windows app that really does it for me. Currently I manage with a mixture of Apple calendar on iOS, eM Client (mostly for accepting invitations) and Alexa, lol.

Have you tried Antevorta? Free, not open source unfortunately and doesn't have a ton of platform support, just Google and Outlook, but written by blind person for blind peoples type UI is at least navigable. I've literally only just synced a Google calendar and poked around for a minute, is working so far.

I find Google Calendar really good, except for the last point you raise. Just turn first letter nav off, press a and you're good to go