Learn Figma, Nightmare and Screen-reader

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

OpenGraph images are the images you see when you paste a link into a social platform and it "unfurls" into an image, title, and description. This happens on Twitter, Discord, Slack, and many other platforms. This collection goes over everything from designing OpenGraph images in Figma, to implementing them in CodeSandbox, to returning headless browser screenshots from Netlify Functions, and finally using Cloudinary as a write-through cache. 

You will come away from this collection with the ability to ship an API that you can use on any of your sites, and also on-demand, that can generate images for not only OpenGraph unfurls, but also for Instagram, GitHub, and more. Using headless browsers with playwright to generate our images means we get full access to all the responsive power of CSS and all the logical power of JS to handle layout, importing assets like pngs, choosing different fonts, and more.

The image below is generated via the project you'll build and deploy in this course

![An example opengraph image](https://relaxed-payne-d1bfbe.netlify.com/opengraph?title=Building%20an%20OpenGraph%20image%20generation%20API%20with%20Cloudinary%20Netlify%20Functions%20and%20React&tags=figma,netlify%20functions,playwright&author=chrisbiscardi)

Building an OpenGraph image generation API with Cloudinary, Netlify Functions, and React

Figma is a collaborative prototyping tool that allows you to responsively design your applications, with resolution presets for all of the most popular devices. In this course, we will explore the fundamentals of Figma’s toolset that you can use for various design functions. 

We will start from scratch, then walk through scenarios you may encounter when designing a website or application. We will cover building reusable designs — known as “components” in Figma — all the way up to prototyping your designs to show screen transitions and animations between state. 

By the end of the course, you will understand the basics of Figma so you can use it to your advantage when building your next app or website.

Design, prototype, and gather feedback all in one place with Figma.

figma

The Beginner's Guide to Figma

screen-reader

There are many techniques for hiding content in user interfaces, and not all are created equal! Learn how different hiding techniques in HTML, CSS and ARIA impact keyboard and screen reader users in addition to visual display. As a bonus, we'll also take a look using a screen reader on a mobile device.

How Visible vs. Hidden Elements Affect Keyboard/Screen Reader Users

Nightmare is a high-level browser automation library.

The goal is to expose just a few simple methods, and have an API that feels synchronous for each block of scripting, rather than deeply nested callbacks. It's designed for automating tasks across sites that don't have APIs.

nightmare

Many pages you'll want to grab data from will require you to log in first. This video demonstrates how to log in and grab whatever data off the page you will need.

Scraping Data from Sites with Login Forms with Nightmare

Many websites have more than just simple static content. Dynamic content which is rendered by JavaScript requires browser to be able to scrape data. This video demonstrates how to use Nightmare (which is a wrapper around Electron) to launch a url and scrape dynamic data.

Scraping Dynamic JavaScript Websites with Nightmare

In this video, you will learn how to create frames (i.e. layouts) in Figma using the "frame" tool. This will allow you to get up and running quickly using pre-defined sizes.

Create a Mobile, Tablet and Desktop Frame in Figma

In this lesson, you will learn how to build a component in Figma, which is the equivalent to a "symbol" in Sketch. It's essentially a reusable piece of design. This will allow you to work more efficiently when designing your app.

Build Reusable Designs with Figma Components

In this lesson, you will learn how to use Figma's ellipse and pen tool to draw a simple clock icon. This will show you how to create vector-based graphics for your websites and apps.

Create a Simple Icon with Figma Ellipse and Pen Tool

In this lesson, you will learn how to add a reusable Figma component to multiple frames in your project. 

Add a Reusable Figma Component to Multiple Frames

In this lesson, you will learn how to duplicate grouped vectors to create a patterned logo in Figma. 

Duplicate Grouped Vectors to Create a Patterned Logo in Figma

In this video, you will learn how to establish your typography system for your project using Text Styles in Figma.

Establish a Typography System in Figma with Text Styles

In this video, you will learn how to create Color Styles, or a color palette so that you can reuse colors across various frames in your project in Figma.  

Create Figma Color Styles to Reuse Across Frames 

In this video, you will learn how to reuse Effects such as a drop shadow using Effect Styles in Figma. 

Reuse a Drop Shadow in Figma with Effect Styles

In this lesson, you will learn how to use Figma's prototyping feature to simulate a screen transition. This is a great feature to demo how users will interact with your app.

Prototype a Screen Transition in Figma

In this lesson, you will learn how to export frames in Figma to share with others. You will also learn how to share links so others can see your design happening in real-time.

Export and Share Figma Frames

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?

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

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

We can find issues with heading levels by utilizing our accessibility auditing tools.  The library react-axe, as well as the browser extension axe, will report any findings concerning heading levels.  The browser extension tota11y will annotate all heading levels on a page and show any in red that have issues.  Finally, we can check the Rotor in VoiceOver in Safari.  The Rotor should have a Headings menu and will list in order all of them that are found on the page.  If headings are missing or inappropriate this will help us find them as well.

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