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!

tesk.page/2025/07/25/gnome-cal…

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

GNOME Calendar: A New Era of Accessibility Achieved in 90 Days

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 …

^{TheEvilSkeleton}

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.

#GNOME #Accessibility #a11y #GNOMECalendar #Calendar #FOSS #FreeSoftware #Linux

Improve accessibility with event widgets in the month view (!576) · Merge requests · GNOME / gnome-calendar · GitLab

Calendar application for GNOME

^GitLab

Happy Disability Pride Month everybody :)

During the past few weeks, there's been an overwhelming amount of progress with accessibility on GNOME Calendar:

• Event widgets/popovers will convey to screen readers that they are toggle buttons. They will also convey of their states (whether they're pressed or not) and that they have a popover.

• Calendar rows will convey to screen readers that they are check boxes, along with their states (whether they're checked or not). Additionally, they will no longer require a second press of a tab to get to the next row; one tab will be sufficient.

• Month and year spin buttons are now capable of being interacted with using arrow up/down buttons. They will also convey to screen readers that they are spin buttons, along with their properties (current, minimum, and maximum values). The month spin button will also wrap, where going back a month from January will jump to December, and going to the next month from December will jump to January.

• Events in the agenda view will convey to screen readers of their respective titles and descriptions.

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 🩷

• ko-fi.com/theevilskeleton
• github.com/sponsors/TheEvilSke…

#Accessibility #a11y #DisabilityPrideMonth #GNOME #GNOMECalendar #GTK #GTK4 #Libadwaita #FreeSoftware #FOSS #OpenSource

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^GitHub

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.

#a11y #GNOMECalendar #GNOME #keyboardnavigation #screenreaders #Linux

Improve keyboard navigation and annotations throughout the app for better accessibility (a11y) (#1036) · Issues · GNOME / gnome-calendar · GitLab

GNOME Calendar is not known to be very accessible nor keyboard-friendly. This is a list of currently known

^GitLab

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…

#GNOME #Calendar #GNOMECalendar #GTK4 #GTK #Libadwaita #Accessibility #a11y #Linux

Make the event widget accessible (!559) · Merge requests · GNOME / gnome-calendar · GitLab

This implements button functionality to make it able to focus and activate it. This also sets the appropriate accessibility role and labels/descriptions. Related:

^GitLab

Made some progress in investigating the likely cause of slowness for some #GNOMECalendar users who have a metric shitton of events to display: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-c…

#Sysprof #performance #GNOME

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 😉

#Linux #OpenSource

— 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”

gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-c…

#MaintainerLife #FreeSoftware #OpenSource #QA #testing #programming #GNOME

When clicking today's date in the sidebar's minicalendar, some events will randomly appear or disappear (#1255) · Issues · GNOME / gnome-calendar · GitLab

Affected version Nightly / main Also version 45.1 from Fedora

^GitLab

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…

In addition to the 2 bugs fixed, these two other issues become clear enough for newcomers to fix:
* gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-c…
* gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-c…

Improve the ordering of events in cells to avoid breaking continuous lines of multi-day events within adjacent cells in week and month view (#59) · Issues · GNOME / gnome-calendar · GitLab

Originally reported by @jfft in Bugzilla (#768619):

^GitLab