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

Your app can react in various way on different network conditions. Cypress has a great toolset for setting up those conditions, which enable you to test your app thoroughly. That way you can ship your app with confidence.

Cypress’ .intercept() command is one of the most fun command to use. And it’s also one of the most useful.

Especially when you are done with all your happy paths and want to increase your test coverage with some edge cases.

These edge cases can mean different data, headers or server behavior. You can modify all of these, dynamically or with a static fixture prepared beforehand

Test Network Edge Cases with cy.intercept() Command in Cypress

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

Web accessibility (also referred to as a11y) is the design and creation of websites that can be used by everyone. Accessibility support is necessary to allow assistive technology to interpret web pages.

React fully supports building accessible websites, often by using standard HTML techniques.

Erin Doyle is an expert in creating accessible React applications and has developed a course that will give you a concrete process for auditing react apps for accessibility. In this course, you will go through different tools and libraries to audit components in a React app.

Auditing React Apps for Accessibility 

AngularJS is an open-source JavaScript framework, maintained by Google, that assists with running single-page applications. Its goal is to augment web-based applications with model–view–controller (MVC) capability, in an effort to make both development and testing easier.

angularjs

Themes convey meaning through color, tones, and contrasts. And the theme color palettes, alphas, and shadows deliver a consistent tone to your application and a unified feel for all Angular Material UI components. Theming allows developers to change the intention and meaning of the application by changing the colors and shadows. 

Accessibility is a huge - often overlooked - feature in modern web applications. Angular Material components all implement ARIA features whenever possible. And for usage scenarios where the ARIA attributes are not explicitly provided and cannot be inferred, then Angular Material will provide details console warnings alerting the developer.

Let’s use the Angular Material Theming service to change the background, primary, accent, and warning colors used within the entire application. These will be configured at startup using the $mdThemeProvider.  

Let’s also resolve the two ARIA warnings shown in console. These originate from icon buttons where the ARIA label cannot be inferred. So let’s add a static aria-label and a dynamic, interpolated aria-label to those buttons.

> This course presented by Thomas Burleson and Aaron Frost

Angular Material: Theming and ARIA

Icon buttons are very common in web applications, yet they often have accessibility problems. Learn how to make your icon buttons accessible to keyboard and screen reader users with HTML, CSS, SVG and ARIA.

Accessible Icon Buttons

Are you building a website or web application that takes user input? Then it's important for you to watch this demo. Learn how to create more accessible forms using basic HTML form labels, fieldsets and legends. You'll even learn a bit about what makes Safari's developer tools pretty awesome.

Building Forms with Accessibility in Mind

Webpages are more than simply how they look. By coding with headings, landmarks and semantic HTML, you can expose a rich document outline to users of assistive technologies, as well as search engines. 

Headings and semantic structure for accessible web pages

What is this thing called ARIA? In this lesson, you'll learn about about WAI-ARIA, a.k.a. Accessible Rich Internet Applications, the W3C spec for specifying accessibility information in HTML and SVG. I cover the basics of applying ARIA roles, states and properties, helpful information for creators of user-interface widgets and component libraries. But it's important to note that you might not need ARIA at all! Before using it, it's important to educate yourself on what ARIA does and doesn't do for you.

Intro to ARIA

Learn how to create a modal dialog with accessible keyboard and screen reader mechanics using the native HTML5 dialog element and experimental inert attribute (with polyfills) and JavaScript focus management. We'll explore how to make a DIV or non-modal dialog into a modal one to contrast the differences. Finally, we'll expose accessibility information for NVDA, Voiceover, JAWS and other screen readers.

For more details on creating accessible dialog content, check out this great article by Marco Zehe, Advanced ARIA Tip #2: Accessible Modal Dialogs: https://www.marcozehe.de/2015/02/05/advanced-aria-tip-2-accessible-modal-dialogs/

### Used in this lesson:
- Google dialog element polyfill: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/dialog-polyfill
- Inert attribute polyfill: https://github.com/WICG/inert

Accessible modal dialogs

Learn the basics of web accessibility testing using the keyboard, [Web Developer Toolbar](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-developer/), [aXe Firefox extension](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/axe-devtools/), and Lea Verou's [Contrast Ratio](http://leaverou.github.io/contrast-ratio/) tool. We'll look at how to get an overview of a webpage's accessibility, with special attention paid to solving color contrast issues.

For more on accessibility auditing, check out this article: https://marcysutton.com/how-i-audit-a-website-for-accessibility/

Basic accessibility testing

Testing for accessibility is easy with automated tools like axe-cli. This command-line tool utilizes the open source axe-core JavaScript library to run an audit on any webpage you give it, returning a set of JSON results you can use in your continuous integration environment or regular development workflow. 

- [axe-cli](https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-cli)
- [axe-core](https://https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-core)
- [aXe Chrome](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/axe/lhdoppojpmngadmnindnejefpokejbdd?hl=en-US)

Accessibility testing with axe-cli

Often buttons need to be handled by JavaScript, and if done improperly it can lead to accessibility issues. In this lesson you will improve a major news organization's global header with some basic HTML and JavaScript.

Accessible Button Events

Adding Cypress to a project is a simple npm install away. We won’t need any global dependencies beyond node and npm to get started with Cypress. In this lesson we’ll look at our existing application, add Cypress as a dev dependency with npm and fire it up for the first time to have a look around.

Add Cypress to an Existing Application with npm

In order to test our application, Cypress will need to visit it in the browser. In this lesson we’ll see how we can visit our application with Cypress and how to configure a baseUrl for Cypress to make that even easier.

Visit a page with Cypress

In this lesson, we’ll add tests that finds a focused input. We’ll use Chrome’s dev tools from inside the Cypress runner to inspect the element and update our test to verify that the expected element is focused. We’ll see how Cypress can be used to test drive our application by creating a failing test and updating our application code to make it pass.
