date pickers

I'd like some opinions ... I'm evaluating a lot of sites these days with
date pickers... I've been making all the customary recommendations, using
headers/id's or scope and <th> etc....

 

But I'm actually starting to rethink this... technically if there is another
way to pick the date such as direct entry MM/DD/YYYY or drop down combo box,
there is a good argument that a popup date picker does not have to be
compliant, since there is an alternative way to achieve the result

 

I've seen attempts to make accessible date pickers, mostly created by visual
folks, in the experimental space.

 

But I've never seen a successful date picker that has caught on... I don't
know, it's such a visual kind of thing, looking at a calendar table... so
far, I've yet to hear about any popup date picker that blind folks like, or
that is more useful than just entering the date directly or using combo
boxes...

 

What do you think? Do you think I should be fighting to get sites to
accessify their pop up date pickers, in addition to either drop down combo
boxes or entering dates directly MM/DD/YYYY? If so, does anyone know of an
out of the box accessible one that I can recommend...?

 

Cheers

David MacDonald