Blog
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How to Conduct an Accessibility Audit on Your Website
Web accessibility is an incredibly important topic, and should be considered as essential as subjects like security, UX (user experience), and design. Not only can poor accessibility cause usability problems for some people, but it can act as a complete barrier to entry. Your audience may be left feeling that you don't care about them, leading to them go elsewhere, to your competitors (be that in information…
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Testing Exception Not Thrown With PHPUnit
Testing exceptions in PHPUnit is fairly easy, and you can be as specific as you need with testing the details of the exceptions being thrown. But what if you need to test that an exception wasn't thrown? The Exception Problem There are many clean code advocates who will tell you that testing for exceptions not being thrown is a sign that your code is doing something wrong, and that the code…
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Improvements to the Accessibility Checklist Tool
Since the initial blog post about my accessibility checklist tool, I've made further improvements which make the tool easier to use and more useful. Navigating to Previous Steps The first version was extremely linear, only allowing you to start from the beginning and progress to the next step. Now, you can move back to any previous step by using the link in the main steps outline. This…
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Testing Multiple Calls To One Method With PHPUnit
Typically if you find yourself in a situation where a method needs to make repeated calls to a single other method with varying values, you will look for a way to implement this into some form of batch call. This simplifies it into a single call that takes a single object, list, or array. Sometimes though this isn't possible, perhaps because the method being called belongs to an external class that…
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Understanding How To Use The Firefox Accessibility Tools
Browsers today are very different beasts than they were a decade ago, and come with some amazing tools for developers to help them work more quickly and efficiently. I want to introduce you to the accessibility tools built into Firefox. Contents Detecting Issues Automatically Colour Contrast Keyboard Accessibility Text Labels Simulating Colour Blindness Viewing Tab…
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Making Testing Easier: An Accessibility Checklist
Accessibility testing can be hard and time consuming, especially if you are new to it. The mix of browsers, operating systems, and user-space tools is vast and ever-changing. The WCAG guidelines are the de facto standards for accessibility requirements across the world wide web, but they're not exactly light reading, and they can be difficult for newcomers to fully understand and take in. What Do…
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Accessibility Testing for Developers
If you're developing for the front end, then it's important to understand how to test that what you produce is accessible. Testing across multiple browsers has been part of front end development since the beginning; browsers would always interpret your code in slightly different ways, both small and large. Accessibility testing is no different really, you're just approaching things from a slightly…
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Testing Colour Blindness Effects Online with SVG Filters
One of the basic rules of accessibility is to not convey information through colour alone. The WCAG lists use of colour as a Level A issue, specifically saying: Color is not used as the only visual means of conveying information, indicating an action, prompting a response, or distinguishing a visual element. This criterion is aimed at those people with visual disabilities, or problems that have…
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Screen Readers and Pronunciation
Screen readers are an essential tool for people who are unable to see, or who struggle to read. Sometimes though, a screen reader needs some extra help, as it can struggle with the right pronunciation of a word, name, or abbreviation. There are things we can do to help nudge screen readers in the right direction in a way that doesn't break the user experience for other people. Contents The…
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Building an Accessibility Browser Plugin
I was recently talking with a former colleague about testing for accessibility, and specifically being able to run an automated test over a website to reduce the time needed to test. My answer then was that there is no way to fully automate testing for accessibility; there's no test that exists which can rubber stamp your website and give it passing marks. But it did give me an idea. Right now,…
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Testing Popstate Events with Jasmine
I recently implemented some browser History API functionality in a project, and part of this was using popstate events to handle application state when the user navigated with their browsers navigational buttons. The problem was when it came time to write tests to cover this functionality, because I was writing in TypeScript, which is a strictly type language, and the version of TypeScript I was…
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Why You Should Not Use Rimraf
A little over a year ago I got into a discussion about the rimraf package . At the time I was using a mix of Mac and Windows and I was looking for a quick and easy way to remove the whole node_modules directory from an Angular project. My search led me to rimraf, which was touted as a cross-platform alternative to the traditional rm -rf written in node. Why Delete node_modules Anyway? The initial…
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PHPUnit - Testing Core PHP Methods
A lot of my focus recently has been outside of PHP so I'm trying to spend some of my personal time working on a personal project. My recent child (code-wise, not my actual child which would go to explain why my time is so lacking the past year) is imogen which is a system built to generate images for email as the email client requests them. My Christmas reading of Clean Code and The Clean Coder game…
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Web Accessibility in Detail
The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect. Tim Berners-Lee When Tim Berners-Lee opened the WWW to the general public in 1991 (previously it was internal to the CERN network) he had a vision that it would be of use by all, and that tenet is as true today as it was nearly 3 decades ago. Back in the 90's, we had little…
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Speed Testing the SPL Iterators for Fetching Files
In the world of PHP some techniques never really go away, despite there being better alternatives added to the core functionality. One of these areas is file iteration, particularly recursively through directories and their contents. It's fairly typical to see some code use a recursive function to: Scan a directory Loop through the scanned list Add entry to a list Check if an entry is a…
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Manual Vs Automated Testing
Testing is an essential part of any software development, ranging all the way from basic testing of some code to make sure it performs the task at hand with the perfect inputs, right up to the rigorous regression tests performed by software houses working on enterprise level applications. Testing usually comes down to two types: manual and automated. But what type of testing is better, and what are…
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Testing Private Member Classes with Jasmine in Angular2 Template Tests
A little while ago I came across an issue when trying to implement template testing with Jasmine on an Angular2 project that was using private member classes. If you try this yourself, you'll get plenty of errors and warnings about various things that either can't be found, used, or can't be spied on. There's not a lot online about this, as it seems that private anything within Angular2 projects is…
