Learn Aria, Ionic and Radium

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

Theming Ionic applications is a topic that is often left undiscussed. Ionic has a robust API to theme your application so you don't have to settle with the default styles.

This course will show you how Ionic’s theming system works so that your application can have its unique look. It will explore the built-in utilities, which you can leverage directly.

You'll be introduced to the built-in CSS utilities that Ionic provides, Ionics grid system, and Ionic configuration settings to create a custom look and feel to your App.

Ionic is the beautiful, free and open source mobile SDK for developing native and progressive web apps with ease.

ionic

Style and Theme Ionic v3 Applications

Building native mobile applications has traditionally been a completely foreign work flow than web development. Recently frameworks, such as Ionic and React Native, have been come out to create a similar web development workflow in a native environment. 

Ionic 2 builds on top of Angular to offer a complete framework for building mobile apps using HTML, CSS, and Javascript that target native mobile and the browser. We’ll work with the RandomUser API to create an employee directory that will let us view user details, update that information, and pass the data back and forth with Ionic 2 routing.

Angular is a development platform for creating applications using modern web standards. Angular includes a wealth of essential features such as mobile gestures, animations, filtering, routing, data binding, security, internationalization, and beautiful UI components. It's extremely modular, lightweight, and easy to learn.

angular

Building apps with Ionic 2

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

Ionic allows you to build cross platform native applications using Angular. In this course we will convert the Eggly AngularJS application into an Ionic mobile application.

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

Building an Angular 1.x Ionic Application

Welcome to the *Ionic Quickstart* series where you will learn how to get started with Ionic from the ground up. We will begin with how to install the required dependencies such as Node.js, Android SDKs and even GenyMotion to installing and running Ionic. By the time you finish, you will know how to create, edit and run an Ionic application. If you are on Windows or Mac and not sure where to start with hybrid mobile development, this is a great place to start!

Ionic Quickstart for Windows and Mac

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?

Learn how to install the Ionic 4 CLI and validate its installation.

Install the Ionic 4 CLI

Learn how to create and use the Ionic Floating Action Button (FAB) in your Ionic 4 application.

Position an Ionic 4 Floating Action Button (FAB) Component in an App

Learn how to create and use the Ionic List component in your Ionic 4 application.

Display Data with Ionic 4 List Component

Learn how to create and use the Ionic Badge component in your Ionic 4 application.

Compose Inline Elements with Ionic 4 Badge Component

Learn how to use the Ionic 4 Actionsheet component to allow for more options than the standard Alert component.

Using the Ionic 4 Actionsheet Component

Creating cross-platform web-based applications with Ionic 4 and React is easy thanks to the Stencil compiler and `create-react-app`.

In this video, we look at how to use create-react-app and @ionic/react to make an Ionic 4 + React application

Create an Ionic 4 application with React

Vue (pronounced /vjuː/, like view) is a progressive framework for building user interfaces. Unlike other monolithic frameworks, Vue is designed from the ground up to be incrementally adoptable. The core library is focused on the view layer only, and is very easy to pick up and integrate with other libraries or existing projects. On the other hand, Vue is also perfectly capable of powering sophisticated Single-Page Applications when used in combination with modern tooling and supporting libraries.

Creating cross-platform web-based applications with Ionic 4 and Vue is easy thanks to the Stencil compiler and the Vue.js CLI.

We look at how to combine these together to use Ionic 4 components within our Vue.js applications.

Create an Ionic 4 application with Vue.js

Learn the changes to the Ionic button component that were introduced in version 4. Understand how to change the style and size of the button and how to quickly include an icon.

Using the Ionic Button Component

Understand the basics of the Ionic Card component. See how images are handled within the card, and how to use its sub-components like title, subtitle, and content.

Using the Ionic Card component

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)

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