In the last year, Cypress Accessibility has grown from its earliest beta form into a mature product with multiple facets and features, supporting many different use cases and scenarios.
All of these are possible, or made better, because Cypress Accessibility runs with no test code updates, no plugins, and no performance impact during test runs. This approach, based on testing against the artifacts you already upload to Cypress Cloud in a standard test run, is also what allows us to surface properly-rendered, full page HTML and CSS snapshots for every violation detected. You can see examples of what this all means in practice using the various resources below.
We recently held a webinar for Cypress Accessibility users to round up some of the changes, and updated our documentation to include guides around accomplishing specific patterns that people have been interested in.
You can check out the webinar recording here:
Accessibility Content
We've published a lot of other accessibility-themed content this year, so here's a few highlights, describing what you can find in each resource.
Cypress Accessibility in Cypress Cloud
- Introducing Cypress Accessibility (blog) - background and underlying goals of the product
- Hands-on with Cypress Accessibility (blog) - short descriptions and video demos of the main workflows, with links to live public examples you can visit yourself
- Improving Accessibility in legacy applications (blog) - how to choose what to work on first and incrementally adopt a standard
- Cypress Accessibility - Guides - a roundup of use cases and applications for Cypress Accessibility
- Cypress Accessibility Docs - detailed descriptions of the current features and capabilities of the product
- Publicly-viewable accessibility report from the Cypress Realworld App - here you can click around and see for yourself how issues are reported and the associated full-page DOM snapshots, sharing functionality, and everything else
Accessibility in general
This presentation from CypressConf 2024 discussed some of the foundational ideas in accessibility, as well as the effect of the European Accessibility Act on the prioritization and urgency many companies feel related to accessibility as a topic.
Accessibility testing and the Cypress App
Accessibility testing with Cypress has a history almost as old as the Cypress App itself, since the introduction of the Cypress Axe package in 2018, which today has over 64 million lifetime downloads on npm. This year we've written some documentation about accessibility testing techniques in the Cypress App and celebrated some plugins and their creators.
- Accessibility Testing - Guide (Cypress App documentation) - using plugins, writing accessibility assertions, element selector approaches
- Open Source Accessibility Plugins in Cypress (blog) - short interviews with the maintainers of three accessibility-related plugins, describing what they do and how they were created
What's next?
We're continuing to expand and grow the capabilities of Cypress Accessibility to help customers meet their accessibility goals. Automation is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to accessibility, and our goal is to bring as much value as possible to this part of your program, with the lowest overhead and impact on your team's existing workflows.
If you'd like to see how this might support your organization's accessibility goals, request a trial of Cypress Accessibility.