You think that 1/3 of user support issues due to elderly accessibility problems is acceptable? That is the context the article gave us. And in my experience for every user support issue you get, there are 100 people that had the same problem but didn’t contact user support for whatever reason.

I am not suggesting my solution is perfect, but I am saying I have successfully used it (although I admit is was a few years ago now, and I first used it was when iOS and Android type=date support was unpredictably broken so type=date must not be exclusively be used). I think it was about iOS10 before the bugs in the UI to clear dates were fixed? Another situation for me was New Zealander’s confused by MM/DD/YYYY native formats when using browsers configured for US date localisation.

Until April 2021, Safari on Mac didn’t even support the date control, and Safari (on Mobile or Desktop) still doesn’t support the min or max value attributes. And time entry is a complete nightmare. I always try to make sure data entry controls work well for everybody, even console devices.

There are always corner cases that somewhat depend on your particular users, so compromises are necessary.

Background: I have programmed HTML entry controls (combo, date, time, number, etcetera) for actual man-years of my own life. That is because I started before jQuery existed, supporting IE5.5, and the available DHTML controls were mad broken for usability. I have had to understand the compromises between different solutions on different browsers, and try to find the most elegant solution, given that data entry on browsers is an extremely gnarly problem space.