Add accessibility option to disable relative-time-element for events, such as commit timestamps.

[mdax-b]

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Dear GitHub team,
working with the Web-UI, I frequently run into time-consuming issues when trying to understand when a particular event has happened or scheduled for within our projects: be it a commit time-stamp, the time of merging a PR, or when an issue was opened.

Why: the relative-time-element disturbs my flow

I always get confused by information such as "A submitted B yesterday", "Z updated 3 hours ago", etc.

Proposal: Enable Users to Disable relative-time-element in Accessibility Preferences

While I understand that relative timestamps are useful in certain situation, I would love to have the option of turning of this way of displaying timestamps.
Having an option to always show real timestamps (optionally in UTC) would be great, since it would reduce ambiguity and improve many of my workflows where I need to have precise information.

Example: Putting two commits into perspective

I want to know, which one of two commits from last week was published first. I can open both commits and both show a "X committed last week" instead of proper date-times. I have no idea, which day of the week and when exactly was the commit authored -> I thus need to hover over each time-stamp to read the actual date-time in a tool-tip.

This is not user-friendly to me, since the "human friendly" way of rendering the timestamps provides no useful information to me and makes it very difficult for me to put two commits from the same week into perspective.

Hovering the mouse to read the actual date is also not a good solution to me, since it slows me down and breaks my flow during work. I also find it difficult to read tool-tips, in contrast to information that is always there.

[github-actions[bot]]

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[rbri]

While I understand that relative timestamps are useful in certain situation, I would love to have the option of turning of this way of displaying timestamps.
Having an option to always show real timestamps (optionally in UTC) would be great, since it would reduce ambiguity and improve many of my workflows where I need to have precise information.

Same for me - please, please implement this....

[cehfisher]

Thank you @mdax-b for sharing your feedback on this topic! A similar discussion has been raised in this accessibility category and other categories, and it’s already noted internally and in progress. We will follow-up here with any additional questions or updates. Thanks again!