[Blindtlk] Travel booking websites with embedded calendars

[Arielle Silverman]

Hi all. I might have asked this before, but I haven't found a good
solution yet, so thought I would ask again, as this is beginning to
drive me nuts. More and more travel websites, instead of allowing us
to enter our travel dates manually, are displaying embedded calendars
within the date selector fields (at least I think that's what's
happening). When I hit one of these, JAWS will say "arrival date" but
then will say the edit box is "read-only". When I press enter to
attempt to open the box for editing, nothing happens, and JAWS gives
me no information about how to activate the embedded calendar and
choose my dates. I've been using Hotels.com for years to find cheap
hotel rooms, and today when I tried to use Hotels.com, the boxes for
entering my check-in and check-out dates were "read-only". Is there
any way to handle these embedded calendars with JAWS, or is this
another frontier that is gradually becoming inaccessible to the blind?
Are other screen readers better at handling the embedded calendars?
Thanks!
Arielle