After two long and painful years, several design iterations, and more than 50 rebases later, we finally merged the infamous, trauma-inducing merge request !362 on GNOME Calendar.
The calendars list in the quick-add popover has undergone accessibility improvements, providing a better experience for assistive technologies and keyboard users (to a limited extent). Specifically: tabbing from outside the list will focus the selected calendar in the list; tabbing from inside the list will skip the entire list; arrow keys automatically select the focused calendar; and finally, assistive technologies now inform the user of the checked/selected state.
Admittedly, the quick-add popover is currently unreachable via keyboard because we lack the resources to implement keyboard focus for month and week cells. We are currently trying to address this issue in merge request !564, and hope to get it merged for GNOME 50, but it's a significant undertaking for a single unpaid developer. If it is not too much trouble, I would really appreciate some donations, to keep me motivated to improve accessibility throughout GNOME and sustain myself: tesk.page/#donate
It's already available in the current nightly flatpak version. It is so nice to be able to use the new event quick-add popover, with no extra swirly pages etc. to pick the target calendar. Very efficient! 😌
Thanks to @TheEvilSkeleton for their patience and sisyphean rebasing of that much awaited merge request over the past 2 years 🫡
Thanks to @FineFindus's dedication towards implementing this (alongside the individual event .ics export feature) this year, you will be able to use this feature in #GNOME 50 (or the nightly flatpak version of Calendar today): gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-c…
It's already available in the current nightly flatpak version. It is so nice to be able to use the new event quick-add popover, with no extra swirly pages etc. to pick the target calendar. Very efficient! 😌
Thanks to @TheEvilSkeleton for their patience and sisyphean rebasing of that much awaited merge request over the past 2 years 🫡
This week, Georges "feaneron" Stavracas will be doing livestreams between 11h to 14h Brasília Time (14-17h UTC) while working on merge requests reviews in #GNOMECalendar!
Support me on GitHub: https://github.com/sponsors/GeorgesStavracasSupport me on Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/feaneronBecome a Friend of GNOME: https://donate.gno...
It's wild (and unsurprising) to me that journalists act tough when they have ample opportunity to negatively comment on accessibility, but don't ever mention accessibility wins.
Despite all the noise I made with accessibility on GNOME Calendar, no journalist has gone further than "better screen reader support and keyboard navigation", meanwhile most didn't even mention it whatsoever.
There is no calendaring app that I love more than GNOME Calendar. The design is slick, it works extremely well, it is touchpad friendly, and best of all, the community around it is just full of wonderful developers, designers, and contributors worth …
After two weeks of writing, revising, and trying to make everything as digestible as possible, I finally published "GNOME Calendar: A New Era of Accessibility Achieved in 90 Days", where I explain in detail the steps we took to turn GNOME Calendar from an app that was literally unusable with a keyboard and screen reader to an app that is (finally) accessible to keyboard and screen reader users as of GNOME 49!
There is no calendaring app that I love more than GNOME Calendar. The design is slick, it works extremely well, it is touchpad friendly, and best of all, the community around it is just full of wonderful developers, designers, and contributors worth …
Continuing our volunteer effort to make GNOME Calendar fully accessible with a keyboard (see thread for context), we fixed a major bug that was causing the focus to disappear into the abyss when the user tried to tab into the month view in merge request !576. This means, as of this commit, events should now be completely functional and accessible within the month view. Additionally, the merge request changes the keyboard and focus behavior within the month view: Events can only be cycled using arrow buttons, the focus can't escape the month view with arrow buttons, and entering/exiting the month view can only be done with tab. These improvements will be available on GNOME 49.
Accessibility on Calendar has progressed to the point where I believe it's safe to say that, as of GNOME 49, Calendar will be usable exclusively with a keyboard, without significant usability friction!
There's still a lot of work to be done in regards to screen readers, for example conveying time appropriately and event descriptions. But really, just 6 months ago, we went from having absolutely no idea where to even begin with accessibility in Calendar — which has been an ongoing issue for literally a decade — to having something workable exclusively with a keyboard and screen reader! :3
Huge thanks to @nekohayo for coordinating the accessibility initiative, especially with keeping the accessibility meta issue updated; Georges Stavracas for single-handedly maintaining GNOME Calendar and reviewing all my merge requests; and @tyrylu for sharing feedback in regards to usability.
All my work so far has been unpaid and voluntary; hundreds of hours were put into developing and testing all the accessibility-related merge requests. I would really appreciate if you could spare a little bit of money to support my work, thank you 🩷
As we are making good progress on #accessibility for GNOME Calendar lately (big thanks to @TheEvilSkeleton there) I have now rewritten and updated the description of this meta ticket to reflect the current status: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-c…
15 of 28 checklist items completed as of May 22nd, 2025, based on what issues I've been able to find so far.
As part of our volunteer-driven accessibility initiative in GNOME Calendar, and for the first time in the 10+ years of Calendar's existence, we finally completed and merged the first step needed to have a working calendar app for people who rely on keyboard navigation. This merge request in particular makes the event widgets focusable with navigation keys (arrow left/up/right/down) and activatable with space/enter. This will be available in GNOME 49.
Most of GNOME Calendar's layout and widgets consist of custom widgets and complex calculations, both independently and according to other factors (window size, height and width of each cell, number of events, positioning, etc.), so these widgets need to be minimal to have as little overhead as possible. This means that these widgets also need to have the necessary accessibility features reimplemented or even rethought, including and starting with the event widgets.
We also hope to get other parts of GNOME Calendar accessible before GNOME 49, but I can't promise anything at the moment. We did start working with making the month view accessible: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-c…
This implements button functionality to make it able to focus and activate it. This also sets the appropriate accessibility role and labels/descriptions. Related:
Georges Basile Stavracas Neto, Hari Rana, and Jean-François Fortin Tam present this GUADEC 2024 Day 1, Track 1 talk.Between long and tedious RFCs, web-based ...
I would love to encourage y'all #GUADEC attendees to use the "Download" button from the event's Indico platform (that button is in each event's details page) to use it directly in #GNOMECalendar, but… it turns out that you'd run into this silly timezones bug where the event importer dialog considers UTC times to be the local time 🤦
So… can I motivate someone to send a merge request for gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-c… ? This would be timely for #GNOME's main conference next week 😉
— Them: “Please test #GNOMECalendar's sidebar again” — Me, coming back from another round of testing: “Code’s haunted” — Them: “What?” — Me, loading a pistol and getting back to the bug tracker: “Code’s haunted”
Every #GNOMECalendar user owes a HUGE amount of gratitude to @khemicalkoder for solving the timelines backend bug that flew under the radar for years! It was causing at least two heisenbugs and obfuscating testing for a bunch of other bugs in the #GNOME calendaring application. This merge request was absolutely amazing: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-c…
