Testing is crucial to ensuring the functionality, quality, accessibility, security, and performance of your content driven web application. Testing lets you assess the user experience and determine if further development is necessary. Your web application should meet quality standards and perform as expected.
This provides basic testing guidance for you to consider to make your web application accessible and user-friendly.
| Components | |
|---|---|
| Color contrast | Ensures that the contrast ratio is optimized for readability. Checks need to be done for various types of color blindness and user defined high contrast forced colors. |
| Typography | Determines if the application accommodates different devices and settings. By using relative font size and non linear scaling the typography can still be usable on the max size. |
| Images | Ensures that the images are high quality and can load quickly. It is important to check for correct fallbacks with no network and optimized assets for higher resolutions. |
| Navigation | Ensures that the navigation is clear and usable by mouse, touch and keyboard navigation. Checking the history api ensures the back and forward navigation is also preserved correctly. |
| Search | Check for low latency in response times to queries in the URL query parameters and search field. |
| Form | Ensures that all forms are user-friendly to complete and submit. If overriding the default form submission the correct events need to be listened to and checked for proper form reset and protection against malicious user input. |
| Performance | Ensures that the application is efficient and responsive, with fast load times. This should be an important part of regression testing too. |
There are many tools you can use to check web accessibility. It is important to use multiple methods in order to cover the range of accessibility components. Be sure to check for ARIA labels, a11y on DOM elements, keyboard navigation, and screen reader use.
Front end testing frameworks, such as Jest, Vitest, Cypress, Mocha or Jasmine help you write tests efficiently and support behavior-driven and test-driven development. With integrations into CI/CD pipelines you can also automate your tests and help prevent regression bugs in commits.
Runner frameworks, such as Web Test Runner, Playwright, Web Driver or the Test Runner in Node.js let you execute these tests efficiently and support testing across multiple environments and platforms. This is not an exhaustive list and depending on the framework you are using there could be testing built-in.