Learn Algolia, Aria and Cypress

A large number of people are unable to use the web effectively due to an impairment or disability.

As developers there are several tools and techniques we can use to make our web applications accessible, ensuring a great user experience that includes everyone.

We all agree that Accessibility is important. However, it’s a broad landscape and can be overwhelming figuring out where to start!

Erin Doyle is an expert in creating accessible React applications and has developed a course that will give you a concrete process for testing, refactoring, and building your applications with accessibility in mind.

After this course, you'll have a jump start on auditing and fixing accessibility issues in your applications and gain a better understanding of your target users and how to approach your web app design from their perspectives.


React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

Develop Accessible Web Apps with React

Imagine the following.

You join a new project and after getting access to the repo you notice that there's no tests.

You decide to ask the team whether they are in different repo or something and unfortunately the answer is:

>We don't have any tests, we didn't have the time.

😐

In this collection we're going to learn how to add e2e tests with cypress.io to an existing React app in order to do two things:

- 🌟 Ensure that our app currently works as intended
- 🌟 Allow us to add features to it with a technique called "Cypress Driven Development" 

In less than 20 minutes we're going to go through:

- ⚡️Adding cypress.io setup to an existing project
- ⚡️Testing search functionality with `data-cy` properties
- ⚡️Using "Cypress Driven Development" to add a new feature to an app
- ⚡️Use Cypress UI to debug an API response
- ⚡️How to use `cy.only` and `cy.skip` in order for us to build our e2e test suite faster

and much more!

Fast, easy and reliable testing for anything that runs in a browser.

cypress

Add e2e tests with cypress to a React application

One of the most important — but most ignored — practices for web developers is performing end-to-end testing on applications before they go live into production. You know: making sure they work like they’re supposed to. But testing can be tedious, and definitely not fun.

In this course, Brett Cassette will show you how you can test all layers of your application stack, simultaneously, with Cypress. When you use Cypress, it’s like having a robot that uses your app the way a real user would. Cypress reports if things work the way you designed them to — and if they don’t — every step of the way. And it’s fun.

After completing this course, you’ll be ready to apply the same E2E testing principles to your own applications. Stop leaning on your QA department (if it exists) to stress-test your application, and ship your app knowing it’s ready. 


Test Production Ready Apps with Cypress

Today’s users expect great things from their search experiences — speed, relevance, and usability, to name a few. Algolia provides developers with out-of-the-box and customizable search experiences that are a joy to build.

This introductory course on the Algolia search solution focuses on the user-facing part of search. Using the Algolia InstantSearch.js front-end library, we’ll see how to build an engaging search experience in no time. (28 minutes, to be exact.) 

**Prerequisites:** 
You don’t need previous experience with search to follow this course — we’ll use an example index with an e-commerce data set preconfigured. We will work mainly in JavaScript, so basic JS knowledge is expected.

If you want to play with your own index settings and data set, you can [create a free Algolia account here](https://www.algolia.com/users/sign_up/hacker/?utm_medium=link&utm_source=egghead&utm_campaign=education), but this is not required to follow along with this first course. 

Algolia's full suite APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences for their customers across all platforms and devices. Type a query. Click a link. Open an app. Everything your customers do sends a signal about what they want. Algolia decodes that intent to deliver the right content - instantly.

algolia

Getting Started with Algolia InstantSearch.js

The tools available for unit testing have come a long way. While testing may never be “easy”, the available tools have certainly moved testing closer to the simple end of the spectrum. Full end to end testing hasn’t quite kept the same pace and as a result many applications are testing manually and often by users in production. Cypress provides a testing environment that makes end-to-end testing fast and reliable with a simple API that makes creating automated unit tests for your web applications a no-brainer.


End to End testing with Cypress

Accessibility (or a11y) is an important but often neglected in the world of web development. Many developers find themselves coding user interfaces without any knowledge of keyboard or screen reader requirements. 

The fact is that accessibility doesn't happen by accident. Often it is seen as too hard or time consuming. This doesn't have to be the case. By following a handful of high-value patterns and practices, we can open our web apps to humans that otherwise wouldn't be able to interact with them at all.

This course will introduce you to accessibility through hands-on, technical examples that are way more effective than reading 10-year-old static web content.



WAI-ARIA, the Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite, defines a way to make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities. It especially helps with dynamic content and advanced user interface controls developed with Ajax, HTML, JavaScript, and related technologies. 

aria

Start Building Accessible Web Applications Today

Skeleton screens show users that content is loading, offering a vague preview of how content will look once it fully loads.

CSS Animations are crucial for the perceived performance purposes since it shows for the user the content is loading by using animations as feedback for whoever is accessing the page. 

Follow the steps in this course and you will learn how to create a beautiful and pleasant Skeleton Loader for your web app using CSS animations, focusing on Web Accessibility and Web Semantic.

Creating Accessible Skeleton Loader Animation from Scratch with HTML and CSS

When you have a large result set for a specific query and usually not displaying more than a few dozen simultaneously. Pagination is a popular widget that allows the user to switch between pages of the results.

Paginate Large Sets of Algolia Data with Instantsearch JS Pagination widget

The stats widget is used to display useful insights about the current results like the number of hits and the time taken to compute the results inside the engine.

Inform users about the current result set with Instantsearch JS Stats widget

The first step to implement Algolia on the front end using Instantsearch : importing and setting up the library with your credentials. This is what will allow the library to initiate the connection to Algolia servers and the first step to complete before adding some useful widgets.

Set up the Instantsearch JS Library

In this lesson we’ll build a search experience reduced to it’s 2 essential components : a search input and the displayed results. As simple as it is, to build this from scratch would require a fair amount of work. Between listening to the input, making the api call, parsing and displaying the result... To build this using Algolia’s Instantsearch library requires a few lines of code with simply two widgets: the Searchbox and the Hits widget.

Search an Algolia Index with Instantsearch JS searchbox and hits widgets

Displaying barebones Hits won’t catch your user’s attention. The UI is key to provide a good search experience and hits are the meat of this experience so they need extra attention. By using Mustache templating we’ll see how to display rich results to your users. 

Display Rich results with templates in the Hits widget for Instantsearch JS

Every  good search UX make users understand instantly why a given hit is being displayed as part of the result set. One way to achieve that is to highlight the keywords from the query directly inside the Hits. This is built in the API JSON response and in this video we’ll explain how to leverage it easily.

Highlight Keywords in Query Results using the Instantsearch JS Hits Widget

Searching is obviously not limited to inputting text in a searchbox. If your dataset allows it Algolia can leverage of attributes and values. To make use of those facets on the front end, one of the most common widget that you can find in a search UI is the refinement list. With this widget, the user can filter the dataset based on facets. This widget only displays the most relevant facets for the current search context.

Filter Datasets with Facets using Instantsearch JS to add a Refinement List

The hierarchical menu widget is used to create a navigation based on a hierarchy of facet attributes. We generally implement it for categories with subcategories.

Browse results based on a hierarchy of Facets (HierarchicalMenu) in Instantsearch JS

The range input is a simple but useful widget that allows a user filter the results by selecting a numeric range with a minimum and maximum input. In an e-commerce website for instance, this widget would be useful to limit the results where the price is comprised between $X and $Y.

Refine a dataset using a numeric range in Instantsearch JS with the Range Input widget

When performing a complex query, based on several active facets and filters, its tedious for the user to start from scratch if she has to unset all refinements one by one. Thanks to the clearAll widget, this task becomes a one click action for the user and is trivial to implement for us developers as it requires no configuration.

Reset all active refinements with the clearRefinements Instantsearch JS widget

All Instantsearch widgets are added to the page in a similar fashion and they also share a number of common options that we’ll cover in this video. We will be playing with a dummy menu widget that won’t be part of the final project just to showcase all those options.

How to Add Instantsearch JS widgets and their common attributes 

The Chrome Developer Tools (DevTools for short), are a set of web authoring and debugging tools built into Google Chrome.

chrome-devtools

What's in a name? In this lesson, I'll explain the concept of naming interactive elements for screen reader users, including forms, buttons, and links. You'll learn how to debug accessible names and descriptions using the Chrome Accessibility Developer Tools (previously a Canary experiment, now in Chrome), using multiple labeling techniques. We'll also listen to the effects of proper accessible names and descriptions in Voiceover and Safari.

For more information and the nitty-gritty browser implementation algorithm, refer to WAI-ARIA 1.1: 
- https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-1.1/#namecalculation
- https://www.w3.org/TR/accname-1.1/

What is Accessible Name Calculation?

Using cy.server, cy.route, and cy.wait, we can intercept requests to our real backend, and return known mock responses.

The pros of using this approach:
- It's much faster than interacting with the real backend
- Doesn't need to seed data to the backend
- Easy control of requests and responses
- Can mock network delay and failure

Cons:
- No guarantee the stubs match the real backend responses
- Not full end-to-end testing

Recommended Homework:
- Mock the route to create a new todo, and reply with a 200
- Mock the route to edit an existing todo, and reply with a 200

Mock Your Backend with Cypress

Learn how to setup your [Cypress development environment](https://docs.cypress.io/guides/tooling/intelligent-code-completion.html#Reference-type-declarations-via-tsconfig) with Intellisense, custom Cypress configuration in cypress.json, and [get settings autocompletion in VSCode](https://docs.cypress.io/guides/tooling/intelligent-code-completion.html#Set-up-in-your-Dev-Environment-1).  

Recommended Homework:
- Setup your Cypress dev environment

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