✨ Testing Accessibility with Marcy Sutton ✨

Building accessible web applications with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and React

Ensuring your frontend code is accessible requires consistent development effort and testing of inclusive markup and scripted interactions. In this workshop we’ll build an accessible web application using widely supported and proven tools and techniques. We’ll focus on the tricky parts you’ll run into building interactive UI components.

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Prerequisites

• This workshop is intended for intermediate to advanced web developers. Beginners are still welcome to follow along.
• Experience with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript will be necessary. Experience with React will be helpful.

Options for working with this material

• Browser-based setup with GitPod
  • GitPod provides a cloud-based development environment similar to VS Code
  • Requires a login with Github
  • Note: GitPod may have accessibility issues
• Download a zip file for local setup
• Clone this Git repo for local setup (see instructions below)

System Requirements for Local Setup

• git v2.13 or greater
• NodeJS 12 || 14 || 15 || 16
• yarn v1

All of these must be available in your PATH. To verify things are set up properly, you can run this:

git --version
node --version
yarn --version

If you have trouble with any of these, learn more about the PATH environment variable and how to fix it here for windows or mac/linux.

Setup

If you want to commit and push your work as you go, you’ll want to fork first and then clone your fork rather than this repo directly. Be sure to fetch the latest code on the day of the workshop by syncing your fork.

After you’ve made sure to have the pre-requisites installed, you should be able to run a few commands to get set up:

git clone https://github.com/testing-accessibility/workshop-interactions-mechanics.git
cd workshop-interactions-mechanics
yarn

There may be periodic changes to this repo. To update your local build, run:

git pull

Note: if you have local changes, you'll need to commit them to a branch. Here's some extra help on using Git: [https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/git-pull-explained/]

If you get any errors when building the site, please read through them and see if you can find out what the problem is. If you can’t work it out on your own then please file an issue and provide all the output from the commands you ran (even if it’s a lot).

Running the project locally

This repo contains various workshop files and a React web application. To get the app up and running (and really see if it worked) with Parcel, run this command from the project’s root folder:

yarn start

This should start the site for your browser at the address indicated in your Terminal: http://localhost:1234

You can also view a deployed version: https://workshop-interactions-mechanics.testingaccessibility.com/

Working through the exercises

This is my favorite topic in accessibility: user interactions and mechanics! We’ll dig into common patterns for keyboard interactions and how screen readers overlap. We’ll use JavaScript and advanced techniques to craft accessible experiences for a variety of user inputs.

This workshop will touch on numerous components including skip links, the date picker, form validation, and an image slideshow. The local URL is: http://localhost:1234/

• exercise1-the-keyboard
• exercise2-focus-management
• exercise3-screen-reader-overlap
• exercise4-announcements-with-AT
• exercise5-advanced-scripting-ARIA

This structure will allow you to iterate on working files with separate directories for the example sections.

The purpose of an exercise is not for you to work through all the material. It’s intended to get your brain thinking about the right questions to ask as we go through the material together.

Contributions of any kind are welcome!

Workshop Resources

Links from this and all of the Testing Accessibility workshops have been compiled on a resources page: https://workshop-resources.testingaccessibility.com/#workshop-interactions-mechanics