pa11y VS Playwright

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).

We start with a project that was bootstrapped with npx create-next-app. For the E2E test we use Playwright and set it up as described in the testing guide provided by Next.js.

Playwright is a powerful tool developed by Microsoft, it allows developers to write reliable end-to-end tests and perform browser automation tasks with ease. What sets Playwright apart is its ability to work seamlessly across multiple browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and WebKit), it provides a consistent and efficient way to interact with web pages, extract data, and automate repetitive tasks. Moreover, it supports various programming languages such as Node.js, Python, Java, and .NET, that’s making it a versatile choice for web scraping projects. Whether you're scraping public data for analysis, building a web crawler, or automating manual workflows, Playwright has you covered.

The consensus I could gather is either use playwright or use a workaround to solve it in the puppeteer layer. The root cause of the bug is a websocket size limitation on the CDP protocol for chromium.

With the advent of tools like Puppeteer and now Playwright, end-to-end testing has become much easier and more reliable. For anyone who's used Selenium in the past, you know what I'm talking about. Puppeteer has opened the way in terms of E2E tooling, but Playwright has taken it to the next level and made it easier to await for certain selectors or conditions to be fulfilled (via locators), thus making tests more reliable and less flaky. Also, it's a game changer that it introduced a test-runner - this made the integration between the headless browser and the actual test code much smoother.

In this tutorial, our main focus will be on Playwright web scraping. So what is Playwright? It’s a handy framework created by Microsoft. It's known for making web interactions more streamlined and works reliably with all the latest browsers like WebKit, Chromium, and Firefox. You can also run tests in headless or headed mode and emulate native mobile environments like Google Chrome for Android and Mobile Safari.

// playwright.config.ts import { defineConfig } from "@playwright/test"; /** * See https://playwright.dev/docs/test-configuration. */ export default defineConfig({ testDir: "./src/pages", reporter: "list", use: { baseURL: "http://localhost:5432/", }, timeout: process.env.CI ? 10000 : 4000, // ... more options });

Issues with Playwright

Fast and reliable end-to-end testing for modern web apps | Playwright

This means you cannot place test files outside of this directory, which was brought up as a question on Github some time ago. Initially, I thought it would be nice to add another folder in the repo called "scripts", but Playwright does not allow multiple testDir values.

4.Playwright: Playwright is a browser automation library by Microsoft. Key Features: Supports Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit. Provides cross-browser testing capabilities. Allows automating web, mobile, and desktop applications