Gabriel Fouasnon WAAAT! Accessibility Testing JupyterLab | JupyterCon 2023

Have you ever wondered how to make a complex web application accessible to disabled users? There are many pieces to this puzzle, which include things like using semantic HTML, consulting disabled users, and testing your app before releasing it. In this talk, we will look at testing, specifically how you can use existing tech to increase the portion of testing that can be automated, while keeping in mind that you will always at some point need to test with disabled users. When it comes to accessibility testing, one of the challenges—and opportunities—in working with JupyterLab is that well known existing solutions are geared towards low-interaction web pages rather than highly interactive web apps. The better part of my work for over a year has been working with designers and developers in open source to develop an accessibility testing solution capable of dealing with the complexity of JupyterLab. In this talk, I am going to do a deep dive of this testing solution as well as the challenges faced and lessons learned. I will show-and-tell a testing system combined with a documentation system, inspired in part by the work of the W3C Accessibility Conformance Testing (ACT) group. Most importantly, I will demonstrate how two tools, Playwright and GitHub Actions, can be combined to create a powerful CI/CD system for automated accessibility testing. It's not magic. You still have to write the tests yourself. But it's a powerful combination that you can learn by coming to this talk. You can then adopt and adapt this system to many other complex web apps when you need to get serious about making them accessible to disabled users. Intended audience Anyone curious about automated UI testing and accessibility! Some familiarity with web accessibility will be useful—for example, knowing what WCAG and Pa11y are; if an attendee doesn't already know these terms, attending any other accessibility talk before this one should give all of the accessibility background needed for this