pa11y VS a11y-dialog

Pa11y is your automated accessibility testing pal (https://pa11y.org/) by Rowan Manning

And educate himself just a tiny little bit? ;)

Then in his next web project, he just might use https://github.com/pa11y/pa11y and make the world a better place!

Pages should have descriptive titles. Make use of tag. Not just for accessibility reasons, its one of the key tools to improve your SEO.

iFrames should have descriptive titles. iFrame is basically a page within a page, same rule applies for it too.

tag should have lang attribute. It helps screen readers to use correct pronunciation. If parts of your website use different languages, add lang attribute to respective elements as well.

Roles: ARIA roles define the type of element and its purpose. Roles can be used to indicate whether an element is a button, link, menu, dialog, or other interactive components. For example, role="button" can be added to a

element to convey that it functions as a button.

Labels. Interactive elements should have accessible name inside aria-label

Element semantics should not be inappropriately suppressed with aria-hidden. Avoid hiding elements from accessibility tree; If required, use CSS styles to make element invisible by changing opacity or visibility.

Images should have alt attribute. Have you ever been stuck with slow connection and faced a white square wonder what's that supposed to be? Add an alt attribute so the images could be easily identified by text readers.

Useful tools

Going through all those checkpoints might be overwhelming, and indeed, the larger your webpage or application is, the more effort it will take to find and address them.

There are, luckily excellent tools that can jumpstart the process.

• WAVE: A free online tool that provides visual feedback about the accessibility of your web content, highlighting potential issues and offering suggestions for improvement.
• axe DevTools: An accessibility testing extension for Google Chrome and Firefox that can be used directly within the browser's developer tools.
• Pa11y: An open-source automated accessibility testing tool that you can run from the command line or integrate into your CI/CD pipeline.
• Lighthouse Accessibility Audit: Excellent for a quick accessibility insight, Lighthouse is available with Google Chrome dev tools and checks highlight opportunities to improve the accessibility of your web app.

Remember that automated tools are valuable for identifying many common accessibility issues, but manual testing is often necessary to fully understand and address the user experience for people with disabilities. A combination of automated and manual testing, along with a commitment to ongoing accessibility, is key to maintaining an accessible web presence.

Happy coding!

Original post

Pa11y

Automated libraries such as axe-core and pA11y have been a very seamless way to bring accessibility testing into development teams UI testing. It can get development teams to begin to learn and grow accessibility in their teams. However, one big problem has appeared since the rise in popularity of these libraries.

PA11y - It runs accessibility tests on your pages via the command line or Node.js, so you can automate your testing process

https://github.com/pa11y/pa11y - Tool for testing ally using node.js (it also has integration with Cypress).

If it's a warning it should probably be role="alertdialog" rather than role="dialog". This will allow assistive devices to prioritize its content and trigger things like an alert sound. You probably also want to put keyboard focus on the least destructive action, which in your case would be the "save changes" button, rather than leaving keyboard focus above the close button. Here's a script by Kitty Giraudel that will do most of this for you, if you want.

On that note, TIL about screen reader issues related to dialogs in general, including this built-in. Seems like the question is primarily around how to update the focus target from the "invoking element" to the dialog's content in a reader-friendly way. There's a linked post from the MDN docs with more detail https://www.scottohara.me/blog/2019/03/05/open-dialog.html#i.... They actually still recommend a custom implementation that's considered more robust when used with screen readers: https://github.com/KittyGiraudel/a11y-dialog. I'm glad there's a callout on the MDN docs as I would have assumed this dialog element is screen reader clean. Focus management is always a tough thing regardless.