Until this week, the link I send people to book a call with me, bekee.com/call, went to a Google Calendar appointment page. I had never tested it. Google is about as big as a company gets, and I assumed someone there had checked it, so I didn’t.
On Monday, October 12, I needed to set up a meeting with someone who is blind. Before I sent the link, I decided to check it myself.
What I found on Google’s page
I turned on VoiceOver on my Mac and tried to book a call. I could reach the buttons for the previous and next month, and today’s date, and that was it. I couldn’t find any way to pick a different day.
Then I tried it with only the keyboard and no screen reader. The month calendar is built to move between dates with the arrow keys, and the arrow keys don’t move anything. From the month view, nobody using a keyboard can reach any date except today. (The only keyboard route I found was the “Next day” button on the week view, one day at a time.) That fails WCAG 2.1.1, the keyboard criterion, and you don’t need a screen reader to find it.
Two more problems turned up once I was looking. The time buttons say only the time (“2:30 pm”), so a screen reader announces the date once, when you enter the list, and never on the buttons themselves. And a day with no open times is an empty list, so Tab skips right past it without saying the day is full.
I also ran my own automated scan on the page. It found four heading and landmark issues and missed the problem that made the page unusable. An automated scan is where testing starts, not where it ends.
I sent Google feedback, but they’re busy taking over the world, so who knows when they’ll get to it.
Then I tried Calendly
Calendly is the alternative everyone names, so the same day I set up a free account that matched my Google schedule and checked that too. With the keyboard alone, it does well. Open dates are buttons that say “Times available,” closed dates are disabled, and choosing a date moves focus to the first open time.
With VoiceOver on, it was a different page. After I chose a date, focus stayed in the date table. To reach the times, I had to Tab out past the time zone control, with nothing telling me the times were waiting, and the date I had picked went dim and dropped out of the tab order. My keyboard check had passed it. The screen reader test is what caught it.
So I built my own
I built a replacement. It reads my Gibsonworks calendar and books straight into it, and I designed every part of it around what failed on the other two:
- Every open day is listed, with a heading for each week, instead of a month grid you have to navigate with arrow keys.
- Every time button says the whole day and time (“Tuesday, October 13, 2:30 pm”).
- A full day says “No times available” instead of disappearing.
- Choosing a time moves focus to a heading that says what you’re booking, with the form right under it.
- Mistakes on the form are listed on the page without a reload, because in my testing a reload made VoiceOver start reading the whole page over from the top.
Every invitation has a link to reschedule or cancel, and reminders go out an hour before the call and again five minutes before, with the Meet link at the top. I tested it with VoiceOver, fixed what that test found, and it went live at bekee.com/call on Tuesday, October 13.
What I’d ask you to check
I do accessibility work for a living, and I still hadn’t checked the link I send to every new client. The size of the company behind a tool told me nothing about whether it worked.
If you send people a booking link, try booking a call with it using only your keyboard, then try it again with a screen reader turned on (VoiceOver is built into every Mac and iPhone). If you can’t pick a date, neither can all of the people you’re sending it to. I’m showing those same checks at StartingBlock on Wednesday, October 14, at noon.
Let me know what you find.
