Learn Jasmine, Nx and Screen-reader

In a monorepo, all of your apps and packages reside in a single repo. Structuring your code this way has many organizational benefits. You can more easily manage your dependencies, and you can maintain more consistency across your various apps. 

But, if you attempted to do this with just yarn or pnpm alone, you'll quickly start running into productivity issues. Your build times will be very long, and you'll have to make sure to run builds for any internal packages an app is depending on.

That's where Nx comes in.

Combining the speed of pnpm with the efficiency of Nx gives you an amazingly performant monorepo setup.

Nx builds a graph of your workspace and all of the connected dependencies. If there is a change anywhere, Nx will know about it and everything that is affected by it. 

Which means that Nx is able to use caching to prevent unnecessary builds when nothing has changed. Nx's caching features enable blazing fast <10ms build times 🔥

You get to have all the advantages of the monorepo with none of the performance issues! 

So start watching this course and learn how to achieve these speeds today. 

A Monorepo is where you have multiple projects inside a singular repository.

monorepo

Build High-Speed Monorepos with Nx and pnpm Workspaces

On the surface, starting a project sounds easy. First you make some directories, install some dependencies, then you write some code.

But there's a bit more to it than just those three steps.

The type of project you're working on impacts the decisions you make. It gets more complicated when you're working on multiple projects that are related. For example, maybe you have a customer-facing frontend app, an admin dashboard app, and a single backend used for both.

How does this change your directory structures? How should you share code between projects? What happens when you add a Design System into the mix?

It can get hard to keep things straight in your head.

Nx is a tool that aims to solve these problems for you, whether you're working solo on a small full-stack app or on a dev team of thousands.

It's not just an opinionated folder structure. When you create an app with Nx, it generates unit and e2e test setups as well as preparing bundling and code-splitting with Webpack, and stubbing out common features like routing.

One of the coolest features of Nx is its Dependency Graph. The graph can visually show you the relationship between the parts of your application, and is optimized to ensure that compiling, testing, and linting only happens in the affected areas of your project.

In this course, Juri Strumpflohner demonstrates these features and more through the iterative creation of a React + Storybook + Express app. Don't worry if this isn't your preferred stack! Nx supports the most popular frameworks & libraries on the web.

More importantly, the focus of this course is more on the workflow than the implementation.

Watch Juri's course, and see if the Nx tooling & workflow is right for you and your team!

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

Scale React Development with Nx

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.


Develop Accessible Web Apps with React

Tailwind is a utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces.

tailwind

Architect an Extensible Digital Garden with Next.js, Tailwind, and Nx

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

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

In this lesson Trevor looks at testing AngularJS controllers with scope inheritance with Jasmine and test spies.

Testing Controllers With Dependencies

Custom Jasmine Matchers are a great way to keep your AngularJS Unit Tests clean and tidy. We want to make expectations **readable** and express the intent of the test. Custom matchers help to accomplish this.

Custom Jasmine 1.3 Matchers

An introduction on unit testing a ReactJS component using Webpack and Jasmine. Learn how to use Webpack to package and import dependencies plus take advantage of the babel-loader to write a simple Jasmine spec using the latest ES6 syntax.

Unit testing a React component using Jasmine and Webpack

AngularJS provides helpers for convenient testing of your application. In this lesson you will learn how to test a basic controller with Jasmine and Angular.

Testing a Controller

In this lesson John shows some tricks for speeding up your test suite. He digs into some handy features of WebStorm, including the *ddescriber* plugin, as well as some alternative methods for Jasmine for selectively running your tests.

Speed Testing with WebStorm and Jasmine

One of the beautiful things about dependency injection in your AngularJS apps is the ability to replace dependencies in your unit tests. In this lesson Trevor looks at how to configure Jasmine spies as injectable replacements for dependencies for testing.

Inject Jasmine Spies With $provide

Testing is a first class citizen in AngularJS. It is at its heart and soul. This lesson demonstrates using Karma to write a simple unit test for a Filter.

Unit Testing AngularJS

Unit testing a React component using Webpack and Jasmine, can involve slow and repetitive tasks when confirming that tests are passing when your code changes. For example, manually running commands instructing webpack to compile code plus refreshing the browser. This lesson demonstrates how to speed up your development time by automating these tasks using webpack-dev-server.

Reloading React component tests using webpack-dev-server

Using Jasmine, this lesson will look at testing an AngularJS service.

Testing a Service

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.

Test for Heading Level Accessibility Issues

Similar to Landmark Regions, Heading Levels are used by web browsers, plug-ins, and assistive technologies to provide in-page navigation.

## Rules
* Each page should have at least one `<h1>`
* Pages should be structured in a hierarchical manner
    * `<h1>`: being the most important (usually page titles or main content heading)
    * `<h2>`: usually major section headings
    * `<h3>`: sub-sections of the `<h2>`
    * and so on
* Do not skip heading levels - always follow consecutive order
* Do not use text formatting, such as font size or bold to give the visual appearance of headings.  
    * Use actual heading (`<h1>` - `<h6>`) for all content headings
* Do not use heading levels to achieve visual results only

## References
* https://webaim.org/techniques/semanticstructure/
* https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/page-structure/headings/

Correctly Define Heading Levels of a Web Page

The pluggable linting utility for JavaScript and JSX.

eslint

We have a number of options to use when testing for accessibility issues concerning alternative text for images.  The react-axe library and axe browser extension will both report when an image is missing alternative text.  The tota11y browser extension will annotate any images that are missing alternative text.  Running eslint with the eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y plugin installed will report on any `<img>` elements missing an `alt` attribute.  Finally, we can use a screen reader to actually hear what is read when an image has focus.

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