Accessibility and Testing in Two Popular SPA Frameworks

I love working with JavaScript frameworks. But what I love most is building an interactive user interface with flawless accessibility. You have to be user-centric while developing apps because overlooking an end-user's perspective often leads to a half-baked idea. Considering this point of view, I found gold in Ember and Angular. These frameworks are great for building single-page applications and take accessibility to an extra mile. 

Angular is built with extensive capabilities to build bug-free applications with its supportive architecture. Ember, on the other hand, has got everything sorted for writing the tests to keep a consistent best practice in dealing with test cases among different modules of an application. For more details on different aspects of these two javascript frameworks, you can refer to our blog: Ember vs Angular: Comparing Two Popular SPA Frameworks.

Let's discuss accessibility and testing in both frameworks in brief.

Accessibility and Testing in Ember  

In my opinion, accessibility should be a crucial consideration while building applications. Adding accessibility features at the end or in the middle of a project can be frustrating and can even make it complex to understand. For example, Ember allows you to add attributes, such as "lang" in the language declaration. 

Developers can add attributes at the beginning of the project or can even edit the index file later. As compared to other frameworks, Ember has simplified the problem of accessibility by providing proper attributes to the project. It also allows you to declare the attribute as a parent for defining a different language in some cases.

Ember bifurcates testing into two main categories:

• How fast can testing be executed?
• For which part of the application the testing is conducted/designed?

To address these aspects, Ember conducts three types of testing:

• Unit tests.
• Rendering tests.
• Application tests.

It gives you the power to write tests and be productive from day one. You can be confident that your app will be correct today and for years to come. The developers working on building applications should understand the importance of writing tests to optimize iterations that happen over time. 

Ember advances other frameworks at several points, such as:

• Facilitating testing object methods in unit testing.
• Using tests such as Setup test to validate controllers.
• Extending the scope of the application route and providing a command to generate a route application.
• Testing components, helpers, and relationships for a flawless framework.

Accessibility and Testing in Angular    

The web is used by different audiences, including those who have visual or motor disabilities. There’s a variety of assistive technologies available that make it easier for these groups to interact with web-based software applications. Besides, designing an application to be more accessible generally improves the experience for all users.

“The Angular team values Accessibility, but a framework by itself cannot guarantee accessibility out of the box. The Angular Components team at Google has been developing high-quality Angular Components and the Angular CDK (Component Development Kit), which includes several tools to improve accessibility.” – Zama Khan Mohammed, Software architect and Technical Author

Angular is capable of creating accessible applications with the use of proper tools and practices. 

For example, Angular developers, using tabindex, role, and ARIA can make the most out of accessibility features for any application built with Angular. Additionally, AR headbands allow you to play games just by looking at the screen. 

Here’s what Uri Shaked, Google Developer Expert says on Angular Accessibility:

"You should take advantage of ARIA for building accessible applications with Angularjs. In addition, angular-material, a Material Design component library, has built-in support for accessibility, so if you use it, you get some accessibility support out of the box."

Angular has made it easy for developers to code and test with the use of dependency injection to stimulate requests. It also provides proper abstraction in the document object model to avoid the direct manipulation of the DOM. 

Angular is written by keeping testability in mind. Although developers will have to learn how they can make the most out of the framework. 

It also provides the ‘one-file-one-module’ principle to manage the order of the modules while testing. Users need more facilitation, accessibility, and smart operability in their apps. It allows you to write modular logic units and clear documentation more easily. I always keep a practice to use a combination of unit testing and Angular, which helps me in finding the flaws easily and at earlier stages. 

Angular makes testing trouble-free by providing prominent application parts. Angular allows developers to manipulate the application parts so that the testing can be more conceptualized and implemented. The framework makes testing accessible so that the developers can load the necessary services and perform effective testing.

The Angular community understands the scope of applications well, and of course, it is growing with time. While Angular has good proximity to unit testing, it is not difficult for developers to improve on the code’s orthogonality. And that is the reason that Angular applications are less likely to resist change and welcome updates so quickly. 

With this, Angular provides the base for handling the increasing size and complexity of the application and has made it to the list of practical approaches of testing. 

Angular also has built test runners, like Protractor, to perform end-to-end testing and simulate user interfaces. These rich and stimulating app interactions make applications robust and an easy go-to for usability.

Both these SPA frameworks support two major causes of stable applications i.e., accessibility and testing. I like Angular for its robustness for maintaining accessibility and Ember for its readiness to add accessibility features. So which one would you choose for building your next SPA?