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USWDS - Bug: Date Picker Widget does not use Aria-Current to indicate current date #6546
Description
Describe the bug
The current date or month is not programmatically indicated, making it difficult for users relying on assistive technologies to identify the current date or month within a calendar or date picker.
The current date is currently only visually indicated with the usa-date-picker__calendar__date--today class. Users that use a screen reader will not be informed to identify the current date or month, leading to confusion and inefficiency in navigating date-related content.
Steps to reproduce the bug
- Navigate to https://designsystem.digital.gov/components/date-picker/
- Select the date-widget icon and open up the calendar widget
- Right click the highlighted date and select inspect from dropdown
- The inspect menu should appear with the html focused on the highlighted element.
- The presence of aria-current is missing despite a class of the element of the element being usa-date-picker__calendar__date--today
Expected Behavior
aria-current is used to convey that the initial focused date is the current date
Example: 15
Related code
No response
Screenshots
System setup
- USWDS 3.12
- Dell
- Windows 11
- Edge Version 142.0.3595.94
Additional context
No response
Code of Conduct
- I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct.
- I checked the current issues for duplicate bug reports.
Activity
daresTheDevil commentedon Mar 27, 2026
Confirmed this. The today button gets the
usa-date-picker__calendar__date--todayclass but noaria-currentattribute. Screen readers have no programmatic way to identify it.Added
aria-current="date"to the today button during calendar rendering. Only the today button gets it, no other dates are affected. All 273 date picker tests pass (4 new).PR incoming.
fix(date-picker): add aria-current='date' to today's date button