Learn Aria, Github and Nightmare

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

SSH provides a secure way for your to [connect to and authenticate with GitHub's servers](https://help.github.com/en/github/authenticating-to-github/about-ssh). While HTTPS connections use usernames and passwords as credentials, SSH instead uses public and private key pairs. These can be generated on your system using a CLI like [`ssh-keygen`](https://help.github.com/en/github/authenticating-to-github/generating-a-new-ssh-key-and-adding-it-to-the-ssh-agent) and then associated with your GitHub account using the public key.

In some cases, you may need to connect to more than one GitHub account from the same system. For example, you may have [separate accounts for personal and professional projects](https://ryanharris.dev/managing-ssh-keys-for-github/), which can be difficult to manage manually. Using `ssh-agent` and a SSH configuration file, you can alleviate this pain point by automatically determining which key to use based on your GitHub repository's `git` URL.

Bash is a Unix shell and command language written by Brian Fox for the GNU Project as a free software replacement for the Bourne shell. Bash is a command processor that typically runs in a text window, where the user types commands that cause actions. Bash can also read and execute commands from a file, called a shell script.

bash

Secure GitHub connections with SSH

Github Actions are an awesome tool from Github that allows us to automate tasks using code-based workflow configuration files. There's also a large marketplace that comes stocked with many useful tools that are ready out of the box.

But sometimes the options available don't completely solve our needs or maybe we're working with a new technology that's simply not available as an Action yet. Luckily, Github allows anyone to create their own Actions using common technologies like Javascript via Node.

We'll learn how to create a new Javascript-based Github Action running on Node. We'll first walk through a simple Hello World example, learn how to test it locally, version control it, use it in the wild, and move on to more advanced solutions that include using packages from npm!

GitHub fosters a fast, flexible, and collaborative development process that lets you work on your own or with others.

github

Create a New Github Action to Automate Code Tasks with Javascript

Handy tips for boosting your productivity in GitHub. These are bite-sized things you can take advantage of today to boost your efficiency by 1% or more. What are you waiting for? Check 'em out! 

GitHub Tips & Tricks

GitHub Actions are a powerful workflow tool that allows you to write and use custom code to execute workflows. It's like a serverless CI/CD platform built directly into GitHub. We have access to GitHub's registries, our own repos, multiple platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux), runtimes (VMs and Containers), and languages (JS, Rust, Go, etc) to perform any action we want. We can trigger workflows using GitHub's own events, our custom events, or even scheduled events like a cronjob.

GitHub Actions at Work

Publishing a JavaScript library for public use requires some extra steps. You need to think about how people will use the library. From end users, to contributors your library now has a variety of people outside of yourself potentially making use of the code that you've released into the wild.

From Github and npm, to releasing beta versions, semantic versioning, code coverage, continuous integration, and providing your library with a solid set of unit tests, there are a ton of things to learn.

This series will guide you through a set of steps to publish a JavaScript open source library.

You might also enjoy [this article about contributing to open source](https://egghead.io/articles/get-started-contributing-to-javascript-open-source).

How to Write an Open Source JavaScript Library

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

“Feel free to submit a PR!” - words often found in GitHub issues, but met with confusion and fear by many. Getting started with contributing open source is not always straightforward and can be tricky. With this series, you’ll be equipped with the the tools, knowledge, and understanding you need to be productive and contribute to the wonderful world of open source projects. Much of this series speaks about GitHub, but most of the concepts are generally applicable to contributing to any open source project, regardless of where it’s hosted.

So enjoy the course and start contributing to the projects you use and love today!

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

How to Contribute to an Open Source Project on GitHub

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

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

npm is the package manager for JavaScript. Find, share, and reuse packages of code from hundreds of thousands of developers — and assemble them in powerful new ways.

npm packages almost always have a git repo tied to them for version control. We will start our package by initializing a git repository.

Add version control to npm packages using git init

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

Let's split our changes into separate commits. We'll be able to check over our changes before staging them all from the terminal. Then, we'll see the positive effect it has on our commit history.

Use git add --patch for better commit history and mitigating bugs

In this lesson we’ll talk about what GitHub is and how to sign up for a GitHub account so you can contribute to an open source project on GitHub.

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