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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

TheEvilSkeleton · GNOME Calendar: A New Era of Accessibility Achieved in 90 DaysThere 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 collaborating with, especially with the recent community growth and engagement over the past few years. Georges Stavracas and Jeff Fortin Tam are some of the best maintainers I have ever worked with, especially Jeff’s underappreciated superhuman capabilities to voluntarily coordinate huge initiatives and issue trackers. One of many Jeff’s initiatives is gnome-calendar#1036: the accessibility initiative. It is a big and detailed list of issues related to accessibility, and regularly gets updated. The upcoming release of GNOME, 49, will feature the biggest update GNOME Calendar has ever received (excluding the initial release). It will also be the accessibility update, where we managed to turn GNOME Calendar from an app that was literally unusable with a keyboard and assistive technology, to an app that is actually functional with a keyboard and screen reader in about three months. This article will explain in details about the fundamental issues that held back accessibility in GNOME Calendar since the very beginning of its existence, the progress we have made with accessibility as well as our thought process in achieving it, and the now and future of accessibility in GNOME Calendar.

One of the dumbest design decisions of #GTK is to have "warp scrolling" the default primary mouse button behavior.

Previously, if you middle-clicked the scrollbar, it would jump to that position within the buffer. Primary click moved up/down by page. GTK 3 reversed this for no reason.

There are some limited scenarios where jump scrolling is desired, but you should never break a standard UX convention without a tremendous benefit. There wasn't one.

The new modal dialogs in GTK/gnome that are nailed to the parent window's center and can't be used are such unintelligent design. Libreoffice now uses these for the paragraph style editing dialog so now you can't move the dialog anymore to look at the effect of your settings on the actual document. A similar issue happens with the "save as" dialog in many GTK applications. Often you'd want to look at the content of the document to decide on a file name.

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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. (See !587)

• 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. (See !588)

• 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. (See !603)

• Events in the agenda view will convey to screen readers of their respective titles and descriptions. (See !606)

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

(Boost appreciated)

GitLabImprove accessibility of GcalEventWidget (!587) · Merge requests · GNOME / gnome-calendar · GitLabCalendar application for GNOME

I did a thing. while working on native NFC capabilities, i ended up writing a test program which reads all the info from EMV cards (such as Visa/Master/Amex) and dumps it to try and learn the payload.

the info shown in the #GTK interface is fairly basic mostly as demo, but it dumps a lot more to the shell:
github.com/FakeShell/nfc-teste

it may be possible to use this for malicious purposes with the right skill set, so please use it responsibly =)