Add automated accessibility tests

[clairep94]

Increasing Access

Automated accessibility testing would allow contributors to easily check and update their contributions to match WCAG guidelines.
It would also allow contributors to easily flag areas of the website that may not be completely accessible yet, which were missed through manual testing.

Most appropriate sub-area of p5.js?

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Feature request details

I believe there's currently no automated accessibility testing on p5.js-website. The tool I'm most familiar with is Axe-Core, which can be set up to run with an E2E or component testing framework (Cypress, Playwright or Storybook), and test pages or components against specified WCAG standards.

The work I'm proposing for the initial set up Axe-Core for automated testing for eventual continuous adoption on all pages of the website:

• Choose an E2E or component testing framework & set this up
• Set up Axe-Core to run on one page locally as a proof-of-concept
• Get community agreement on the version of WCAG to use, and rules to add or omit
• Create a new GHA workflow to run automated Axe-Core tests on new PRs

[ksen0]

Thanks for this idea @clairep94 ! This will have to be discussed a bit more, but anyone who is interested to potentially support this is welcome to add their thoughts below.

It might be useful to find recent accessibility bugs (eg keyboard traps on code snippets: #667) or discussions, and use those to suggest what to prioritize during implementation? I believe there were also some color contrast bugs recently.

[ksen0]

Hi @clairep94 ! Just following up on this briefly: the p5.js-website accessibility stewards are working on identifying different web accessibility issues, such as #866. You can use the labels "Accessibility: High Severity," "Accessibility: Low Severity" and "Accessibility: Best Practice" to monitor the issues they will add in the future. These issues and their relative ranking could potentially be useful to validate any particular tool (arguably, automation ought to identify high severity issues with low false negatives; and low severity or best practice with low false positive). What do you think? Are you still interested in working on this?