Learn Alpine, 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

Welcome to this beginner level series on Alpine JS! 👋🏞

Alpine JS is a rugged, minimal framework for composing JavaScript behaviour in your markup. It brings declarative, reactive, data-driven nature of libraries like React or Vue to your HTML templates.

In this series, you will learn about Alpine's handy **directives**. You'll discover how to define a component scope with `x-data`, run code on mount with `x-init`, attach event listeners with `x-on`, display data with `x-text`, decide wether or not to show an element with `x-show`, iterate through data with `x-for`, retrieve a DOM element with `x-ref`, learn how to achieve _two-way data binding_ with `x-model`, and much more.

You'll also learn how **"modifiers"** can be applied and chained to directives to provide additional functionality: control the animation transition of entering and leaving DOM elements, debounce an event listener, etc.

We'll also touch on what Alpine calls **"magic properties"**, which give you access to native browser events (`$event`), reference to DOM elements (`$refs`), and more.

You'll gradually discover Alpine's API and syntax, from building simple tabs to a mini app that fetches a dog picture based on a "breed" search field. 🐶

**Get ready to breathe some fresh air** - it's time to walk into cool, green Alpine pastures! 🏞

Alpine.js offers you the reactive and declarative nature of big frameworks like Vue or React at a much lower cost.

You get to keep your DOM, and sprinkle in behavior as you see fit.

alpine

Sprinkle declarative, reactive behaviour on your HTML with Alpine JS

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

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

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

Setup Your Cypress Dev Environment

Which selectors your choose for your tests matter, a lot. In this lesson, we'll see the recommended Cypress best practices for selectors, and why we should prefer the data-cy attribute.

Recommended Homework:
- Finish the example using cy.contains, and remove the false positives to get a richer sense of why data-cy is a better choice for our selector

Use the Most Robust Selector for Cypress Tests

So you have a production application, and it doesn't use Cypress yet.

In this course, you'll learn how to add Cypress to your existing npm application, and run it for the first time.

Recommended Homework: 
- Look through the tests Cypress spins up for you and learn how typical Cypress tests are setup

Install Cypress in a Production Application

If we want to do full end-to-end testing, then we need to seed our database into a reliable state at the start of every test. In this lesson, we'll learn how to build a Cypress plugin that updates the data in our database.

Seed Your Database in Cypress

Cypress allows full-stack end-to-end testing. You can test the UI, the frontend stores, the XHR requests, and the database, and interact with every layer in the same test.

But Cypress doesn't do all this out of the box. This course will introduce you to the techniques and abstractions used to handle full-stack testing. 

Course Introduction: Test Production Ready Apps with Cypress

Cypress can do more than end-to-end testing. It can fully drive remote applications, including ones you don't own, much more reliably than Selenium.

In this example, we'll use Cypress to build a web scraper to mine data from applications we don't own. This data could be used to power other applications, filtered for data relevant to your use cases, sent to your calendar, or any number of uses. 

Since Cypress is easy to automate, it's easy to integrate with cron or a job framework to run a scraper in an automated fashion.

Create a Web Scraper with Cypress

We can reuse our stubbed responses between tests by using Cypress fixtures. In this lesson, learn how to share data between tests.

Reuse Data with Cypress Fixtures

Learn how to target the elements on your UI, interact with them, and make assertions on their state.

Recommended Homework:
- Write a test that creates a new todo and asserts that the todo is present on the DOM
- Write a test that finishes a todo, and asserts that the todo shows as completed

Write Your First Cypress Integration Test

The Cypress programming model is similar to async and await. When you write Cypress commands, they will be enqueued to be run at a later time, but they will run in the same order as you write them. 

Recommended Homework:
- Verify that Cypress commands run in the order you write them, and not based on when they asynchronously finish. Recommended solutions include using timeouts, and/or synchronously available values as with cy.wrap


Debug and Log with Cypress

Cypress doesn't provide out-of-the-box ability to make assertions on our frontend stores, so let's expose the store to the tests, and assert on it. We'll use our knowledge of Cypress's asynchronous programming style to access properties and functions on the store using cy.its and cy.invoke.

Recommended Homework:
- Consider why it's valuable to test against your frontend store when you can test against the UI

Assert on Your Redux Store with Cypress

Do you need to reuse complex Cypress calls often (like when accessing the store)? 

You can turn them into custom Cypress commands, and even customize their output in the time-traveling debugger, so it's easy to see a snapshot at the point your command ran!

 Recommended Homework:
- Review the Best Practices for Custom Commands - https://docs.cypress.io/api/cypress-api/custom-commands.html#Best-Practices

Create Custom Cypress Commands

External libraries tend to be synchronous, so how do we integrate other powerful tools into the Cypress framework? This lesson walks us through merging in the Lodash library to Cypress to allow us to slice and dice data to more accurately assert on just the pieces of data we care about.

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