pa11y VS virtual-environments

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).

This action runs using Node 16. If you are using self-hosted GitHub Actions runners, you must use runner version 2.285.0 or newer.

This is the OS and version used for the virtual environment in which run our tests. I recommend always using a specific version, such as the latest stable version, rather than latest, which is risky because you may then suddenly start to see test failures caused by a version update that has nothing to do with your tests. See virtual-enviroments for the latest stable version.

This, I setup Azure DevOps pipeline that clones this: https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments Runs it in Linux servers, copies VHD into Storage Account, creates an image from it and makes it new image for Azure Scale Set. Runs every Monday Morning on timer.

I'm in a similar boat - love the performance/battery of my M1 MacBook Air, but the ecosystem is just too messy at the moment for me. I have a few tools I need to use that haven't yet been making official Apple Silicon releases due to GitHub actions not supporting Apple Silicon fully yet. The workaround involves maintaining two versions of homebrew, one for ARM and one for x86-64, and then being super careful to make sure you don't forget if you're working in an environment that's ARM and one that's X86. It's too much of a pain to keep straight for me (I admit it - I lack patience and am forgetful, so this is a bit of a "me" problem versus a tech problem).

My solution was to give up using my M1 mac for development work. It sits on a desk as my email and music machine, and I moved all my dev work to an x86 Linux laptop. I'll probably drift back to my mac if the tools I need start to properly support Apple Silicon without hacky workarounds, but until GitHub actions supports it and people start doing official releases through that mechanism, I'm kinda stuck.

It is interesting how much impact GitHub has had by not having Apple Silicon support. Just look at the ticket for this issue to see the surprisingly long list of projects that are affected. (See: https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/2187)

https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues you can always request additional software to added to GitHub's machines, costs nothing to ask.

I'm not disputing your claim that it could be true as I say, it makes sense, there is even some evidence they are getting ready for feature parity as I said in my comment with the hosted agent builds but I am arguing the point with my "what aboutism" as it isn't clear.

Also Ubuntu 22.04 is not currently available on Github so I can't use CI for now - https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/5428

As for M1 support, I’m still waiting for GitHub to add M1-based GitHub Actions runners (issue).

GitHub provides hosted runners which can run your workflow in different virtual environments. The "ubuntu-latest" environment already contains a recent version of Node.js which is ideal for testing JavaScript applications.

As mentioned in this GitHub issue, the issue seems to affect only windows-2022 image. You can use the following script to install .NETFramework 4.6.1 to the agent.