Learn Apollo, Screen-reader and Tmux

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

GraphQL is a fan favorite for good reason. It lets a client make specific, complex, and/or aggregate queries for data, and it’s user-friendly to boot.

If you’ve been meaning to learn GraphQL and start harnessing its powers, this is a great place to start.

This course is for GraphQL newbies with a basic understanding of React. It focuses on the client-side implementation of GraphQL usage using the Apollo client.

We’ll start with a guide on how to add the Apollo client to an existing project, then move on using the Query and Mutation components to fetch and manipulate data using a GraphQL API.

GraphQL Data in React with Apollo Client

Learn to manage your terminal sessions and work more effectively from the command line using tmux. If you use the command line at all, tmux can make your life easier.

tmux bills itself as a terminal multiplexer. It allows you to wrangle multiple terminal sessions from one window. Instead of keeping track of many terminal windows yourself, you can use tmux to create, organize, and navigate between them. Even more importantly, tmux lets you detach from and re-attach sessions, so that you can leave your terminal sessions running in the background and resume them later. This is especially useful if you're working on a remote server: you can set up a persistent session that will continue running when you close your laptop. You can even share a tmux session to facilitate pair programming.

It lets you switch easily between several programs in one terminal, detach them (they keep running in the background) and reattach them to a different terminal.

tmux

Wrangle your terminal with tmux

Apollo provides a universal GraphQL API on top of your existing services, so you can build new application features fast without waiting on backend changes.

apollo

Created by the team at Prisma, graphql-request is a lightweight package that can be used to send queries to any GraphQL API. Sending a request with graphql-request uses less syntax than a fetch request. In this lesson, we will query the totalDays field using this helper package.

Query a GraphQL API with graphql-request

To query a GraphQL API, all you need to do is send an HTTP request that includes the query operation in the body of the request. In this lesson, we will use the browser’s fetch method to request the total days skied from our GraphQL API.

Fetch Data from a GraphQL API

Apollo Server is a GraphQL server that listens for incoming HTTP requests on a single endpoint.  In this lesson, we will stand up a simple GraphQL service that handles a query for total days skied during a season.

Create a GraphQL API with Apollo Server 2.0

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?

Apollo Client allows you to build performant, production-ready applications that consume data from GraphQL services. In this lesson, we will query the totalDays field using Apollo Client.

Send a GraphQL Query with Apollo Client

React Apollo is a component library that we can use to rapidly build GraphQL client applications with React. In this lesson, we get our React app ready by setting up the Apollo Provider and sending our query using the Query component.

Set Up a React GraphQL Client Application with react-apollo

The Query component is used to render the state of the network request along with the data that is returned from the GraphQL API. In this lesson, we will refactor our application to include an App component that displays the resulting count returned by the totalDays field.

Display Query Results using the Query Component 

We can read data from and write data to the cache directly with Apollo Client. In this video, we’ll update the UI by interacting with the cache instead of sending an additional request to the GraphQL server.

Update the Apollo Local Cache with the readQuery and writeQuery Methods

Queries get data from GraphQL services. If we want to change data, we will use GraphQL mutations. In this lesson, we’ll look at how to design GraphQL mutations to increment or decrement the number of ski days on record.

Change Data with GraphQL Mutations

Apollo Client comes with a local cache. The cache is where Apollo Client saves query results. You can read directly from or write directly to the cache which will allow you to reduce the number of network requests that your application makes. In this lesson, we will write the mutation results directly to the cache using the writeQuery method.

Update the Local Apollo Cache after a Mutation Using writeQuery

Using the GraphQL Schema Definition Language, we can define types that reflect all of the objects available on our API. In this lesson, we will create a SkiDay type and return a list of SkiDay objects with an allDays query. We will also create an enum, which describes a restricted list of allowed values for a particular field.

Create a GraphQL Object Type and Query a List of Objects

The addDay mutation should add details about each ski day. In this lesson, we’ll capture argument values from the GraphQL mutation and use this to change the ski day array.

Add Data to an Array with a GraphQL Mutation

Resolvers are functions that return data for specific fields. In this lesson, we’ll take a look at how to throw errors within resolvers if the data passed as arguments is incorrect or insufficient.

Incorporate Custom Error Handling within GraphQL Resolvers

GraphQL has five built-in scalar types that can be returned from a field: Int, Float, Boolean, String, and ID. It is also possible to create and validate your own custom scalar if you want to return a single value or leaf instead of an object from a field. In this lesson, we’ll build a custom scalar type to handle parsing and serializing dates.

Define a Custom Scalar Type for a GraphQL API

If you want to be able to parse and serialize custom scalar types sent as arguments, you’ll add the parseValue and parseLiteral functions to the custom scalar constructor. In this video, we’ll take a closer look at these functions and how they can be used to transform data passed by the client.


Parsing GraphQL Mutation Arguments with Custom Scalars

When passing arguments to a GraphQL mutation, you can send them inline, or you can wrap them in an input type. In this lesson, we’ll create an input type for the addDay mutation which will allow us to pass an entire object as an argument.

Wrap GraphQL Mutation Arguments with a GraphQL Input Type

GraphQL mutations are used to change data and can be also used to delete data. In this lesson, we’ll make changes to the removeDay mutation to delete a day from the ski days array by id. Additionally, we’ll return a custom type when we send the mutation.

Remove Items from an Array with a GraphQL Mutation

React Apollo comes with a Mutation component that can be used to send mutation operations to a GraphQL API. In this lesson, we will use the Mutation component to trigger addDay and removeDay mutations.

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