Learn Aria, Gulp and Mobx

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

Developing logic-rich applications is a key skill to have.

The TypeScript–React combination helps you unlock that skill, and it’s a great developer experience in terms of writing understandable and refactorable HTML. But the default state management for React has a long way to go to feel simple and maintainable — and that’s where MobX makes your life so much easier. MobX keeps things simple without using complicated setups like `provider` and `connect` that provide way too little value for all the mental overhead. 

In this course, you’ll see how to model your React application logic using simple JavaScript classes — and with the help of MobX, make those classes the beating heart of your React applications. You’ll learn:

- that you don't need advanced annotations and TypeScript features to use MobX
- how to easily refactor code through TypeScript
- how to use TypeScript to track the flow of state as properties change

Develop React Applications with Mobx and TypeScript

MobX State Tree (MST) is a library that helps you organize your application states in a very structured manner. It allows you to create a component model, but for your data!

Course instructor Michel Weststrate—creator of Mobx—will teach you to model application state after your problem domain with MST. You will get hands-on practice and see how MST lets you solve problems with its out-of-the-box support for asynchronous actions, patches, snapshots, and middleware.

Over the 17 lessons, you’ll build a little bookshop application using React, MST, and create-react-app, while learning how to manage the lifecycle of your data by describing data models. 

Join Michel in one of the most popular courses on egghead!

Manage Application State with Mobx-state-tree

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. 

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Start Building Accessible Web Applications Today

MobX is designed to enable building web applications with a complex data model in an intuitive and very performant manner. Using React and MobX is currently the simplest way to build component based web applications.

"Half the code, twice the fun" is how people describe MobX, or "So simple, I cannot believe it just works". 



Manage Complex State in React Apps with MobX

In this series we will take a look at Gulp. Gulp is a task runner. It is the commander of our army of helper robots that take critical, yet totally mundane, tasks and perform them hundreds of times per day so we don't have to. When we sit down to work, we want to enter a single command, and then spend the rest of our day writing code, testing, and basically not thinking about how it is all glued together in the background.

Automation is critical to any project of significant size. We will start with the Eggly Bookmarks application, and develop proper build automation that will include **production ready** tools that you can start using in your applications today!

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.

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Angular Automation with Gulp

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

Since MST offers a runtime type system, it can create and compose types on the fly, making it possible to reuse logic in new and powerful ways.

In this lesson you will learn:
* That MST types are immutable and composed together behind the scenes
* How to compose types explicitly by using `types.compose`
* How to create dynamic, parameterized types by leveraging that MST types are first class javascript citizens

Create Dynamic Types and use Type Composition to Extract Common Functionality

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?

In this lesson, we are going to use aria-current to give a screen reader user more context about what the current page is. Historically, many developers use an `.active` class to indicate that the page in a menu is the same that you're on. 

Instead of using a class, we are going to use the aria-current attribute to add more semantic value to the HTML and use that attribute to style the active link.

Note: VoiceOver testing works best on the Native Safari Browser, hence why we should always use Safari to test.

More resources:
- [Using the aria current attribute](https://tink.uk/using-the-aria-current-attribute/)
- [W3 WAI-ARIA - aria-current](https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-1.1/#aria-current)
- [Breadcrumb Example - w3-WAI ARIA Practices](https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices-1.1/examples/breadcrumb/index.html)

Add Semantic Styling to the Current Page of a Navigation Item with aria-current

Our first layer of defense when building accessible React applications is to add some auditing tools to our development workflow. This should include adding static analysis checking for common accessibility standards and best practices. We can get this with the latest eslint plugin: "eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y". If you are already linting your projects adding this plugin should fit very smoothly into your workflow.

## Resources
1. [List of all the rules supported by eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y](https://github.com/evcohen/eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y#supported-rules)
2. [Comparison of the difference in rules between recommended and strict mode](https://github.com/evcohen/eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y#difference-between-recommended-and-strict-mode)
3. [Background on how the Accessibility API implemented by browsers interfaces with Assistive Technologies](https://github.com/evcohen/eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y#some-background-on-wai-aria-the-ax-tree-and-browsers)

Set up ESLint to Audit Accessibility Issues in React

In this lesson, we will be going over the attribute `aria-expanded`. Instead of using a class like `.open` we are going to use the `aria-expanded` attribute to style.

This accomplished double duty because we have semantic value and visual indicators that a button is open and closed.

To test this, I opened up Safari and used CMD + F5 to turn VoiceOver on. 

- [An Introduction to ARIA States](https://www.a11ywithlindsey.com/blog/introduction-aria-states)
- [w3c Using aria-expanded to indicate the state of a collapsible element](https://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/wiki/Using_aria-expanded_to_indicate_the_state_of_a_collapsible_element)

Add aria-expanded to add semantic value and styling

Continuing to add to our accessibility auditing toolset: react-axe goes hand in hand with eslint and specifically the eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y plugin.  While eslint analyzes our static code, react-axe is able to audit the elements that are available in the DOM at runtime.  As components get rendered into the DOM by React, react-axe is able to immediately check them for potential accessibility issues and will output any findings to the console.  Adding this tool to our workflow gives us accessibility checking as we're developing so that we can eliminate a plethora of potential issues as early as possible.

## Resources
* [List of all rules supported by react-axe](https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-core/blob/develop/doc/rule-descriptions.md)
* [Documentation of the Configuration Object](https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-core/blob/master/doc/API.md#api-name-axeconfigure)
* [How Deque Labs makes decisions on axe rules](https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-core/blob/develop/doc/accessibility-supported.md)

Use react-axe to Audit Accessibility Issues at Runtime during Development

The axe browser extension (for Chrome and Firefox) is an immensely helpful tool for auditing web pages for accessibility defects.  This extension is powered by the same rules engine developed by Deque Labs in their axe-core open source library which also powers the react-axe development tool.  Each reported defect offers a ton of information about the defect, why it's a problem, severity level, groups impacted and ways to fix the defect.  This can be a great resource for learning more about how to write accessible code.

## Resources
* [Chrome browser extension](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/axe-web-accessibility-tes/lhdoppojpmngadmnindnejefpokejbdd)
* [Firefox browser extension](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/axe-devtools/)

Use the axe Browser Extension to Audit a Web Page for Accessibility Issues

Here we use HTML and CSS to create a stylish yet semantic tooltip on a form input. I am using `aria-describedby` to create a relationship with the input and the tooltip. Then I use CSS to style the tooltip and control when it appears or disappears both on hover and focus.

In this video, we use VoiceOver. To test that on a MacOS, use CMD + F5.

A few resources:
- [CSS Triangle](https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/css-triangle/)
- [a11y Style Guide - Tooltips](https://a11y-style-guide.com/style-guide/section-forms.html#kssref-forms-tooltips) - I used this to gut check and with some help with those transitions. 
- [Using VoiceOver to Evaluate Web Accessibility](https://webaim.org/articles/voiceover/)

Create an Accessible Tooltip on a Text Input

Landmark regions are used by screen readers to make it easier for users to navigate the content on the page by defining the structure of the page.  Tools like the Rotor in VoiceOver rely on landmark regions to provide users with the ability to skip directly to the desired section of the page.  We can do this either using HTML5 landmark elements or `<div>` elements with aria roles. In the past, the recommendation was to use both but now we should only use one or the other.

The following are ARIA roles for landmark regions:
* `banner`
* `complementary`
* `contentinfo`
* `form`
* `main`
* `navigation`
* `search`
* `application`

## References
* https://dequeuniversity.com/assets/html/jquery-summit/html5/slides/landmarks.html
* https://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/wiki/Using_ARIA_landmarks_to_identify_regions_of_a_page
* https://www.w3.org/TR/html-aria/#docconformance

Define Landmark Regions of a web page using ARIA roles

tota11y is a great tool to add to your accessibility auditing toolkit.  tota11y is a browser extension available for Chrome and Firefox that helps visualize accessibility violations (and successes), while educating on best practices.  It can make for a really helpful supplement to other accessibility auditing tools.

## Resources
* [About tota11y](https://khan.github.io/tota11y/)
* [Chrome browser extension](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tota11y-plugin-from-khan/oedofneiplgibimfkccchnimiadcmhpe?hl=en)
* [Firefox browser extension](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tota11y-accessibility-toolkit/)

Use tota11y to Visualize Accessibility Issues

It's very important to experience our web applications using the tools and techniques that our users are using.  Many of our users out there may have vision impairments and may use tools or adjust settings to help them see better. Learn how to change the accessibility display preferences on Mac to test your application for issues that may arise due to a lack of contrast between foreground and background colors in your web application which can be exacerbated when users have to adjust these display preferences.

## Resources
* [MacOS Display Preferences User Guide] (https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-accessibility-display-preferences-unac089/mac)

Change Display Preferences on Mac to Find Color Contrast Accessibility Issues

Using our accessibility auditing toolkit we can find issues concerning landmark regions in our web application.  The react-axe library will report findings in the JavaScript console of the browser.  We could also run the axe browser extension to see the same results.  The tota11y browser extension will annotate any landmark regions on the page and therefore if none are annotated it may indicate that they aren't any (_NOTE: tota11y will only annotate landmark regions using aria roles and not those using HTML5 elements_).  Finally using the VoiceOver Rotor in Safari will show us whatever landmark regions have been defined in the Landmarks menu. 

Test for Landmark Region Accessibility Issues in React

Landmark regions are used by screen readers to make it easier for users to navigate the content on the page by defining the structure of the page. Tools like the Rotor in VoiceOver rely on landmark regions to provide users with the ability to skip directly to the desired section of the page. We can do this either using HTML5 landmark elements or <div> elements with aria roles. In the past, the recommendation was to use both but now we should only use one or the other.  We should prefer HTML5 to ARIA roles when possible.

The following are HTML5 elements for landmark regions:
* article
* aside
* header
* footer
* main
* nav
* section

## References
* https://dequeuniversity.com/assets/html/jquery-summit/html5/slides/landmarks.html
* https://www.a11ymatters.com/article/intro-html5-sectioning-elements/
* https://www.w3.org/TR/html-aria/#docconformance

Define Landmark Regions of a web page using HTML5 sectioning elements

Labeling inputs, elements, and widgets add context and clarity for assistive technology such as screen readers. Some elements do not already have some sort of labeling text being displayed visually, such as a `<button>` without descriptive text or an `<icon>` or part of a more complex widget.  Others may have some form of text label but it is not descriptive enough for those who cannot see it.  The addition of an `aria-label` attribute to the element will provide it with an accessible label so that when that element is focused by a screen reader, for instance, a label is read that better describes the element and what a user can expect from it.

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