How Screen reader users read the web

Posted by Anna Maier on December 14, 2020

When making a web site accessible, you inadvertently run into the topic of screen readers. Screen readers help people with visual impairments understand what is on the screen.

Few people think about the implications of having visual content translated into an auditory representation. In this article, I want to explain how screen reader users “hear” the web, what strategies they apply when confronted with a new web site and how you can make their life a bit easier.

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Testing Accessibility with Accessibility Insights

Posted by Anna Maier on December 9, 2019

There are many tools out there that help you check if your website or webapp is accessible. Most of them do an automatic check based on some accessibility guidelines. Some also provide functionality to do checks yourself, for example, to check the color contrast. The open source tool Accessibility Insights takes a different approach: on top of the usual automated checks there is a set of guided manual checks. This makes it a great tool to learn about accessibility testing and programming.

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Frontend Testing with Jest – Mocks

Posted by Anna Maier on July 5, 2019

Jest is a popular unit testing framework for Javascript. In an earlier post, we have looked in detail on how you can use assertions in Jest unit tests. In this post, let’s look into using mocks in Jest tests.

So, what are mocks?

In unit tests, you want to focus on one functionality only and ignore the logic of functionality you are dependent on. This is where mocks come into the picture. They make it easy to provide dummy objects for dependencies . Additionally, mocks keep track of all interactions with the mock. This way, you can check if your code calls the dependent code in the right way.

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Raising awareness about Accessibility

Posted by Anna Maier on May 24, 2019

“Software programs should be usable by everyone.”

I think everyone can agree with that statement. Unfortunately, there is some extra work needed to make a program truly accessible. Even worse, this is often only thought of in the last bit of a project. This leads to accessibility often being cut out because of time and budget constraints. If accessibility would be considered from the start, it could be built in more easily. But how can we make us as developers more aware so that we actively think about accessibility when building the software?

Our answer: let’s experience first hand how (in)accessible our software is!

We decided to host an accessibility challenge for our colleagues. Read below how this turned out…

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