How can you ensure Laravel apps are accessible and usable?

1 Use semantic HTML and ARIA

Semantic HTML is a way of writing HTML code that describes the meaning and structure of your content, rather than just its appearance. Semantic HTML helps screen readers, search engines, and other tools to understand and navigate your app. For example, use <h1> to <h6> tags for headings, <p> for paragraphs, <nav> for navigation, and <main> for the main content. ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) is a set of attributes that you can add to your HTML elements to provide additional information and functionality for assistive technologies. For example, you can use ARIA roles, states, and properties to indicate the role, state, and property of an element, such as a button, a tab, or a modal. Laravel provides a blade template engine that allows you to write semantic HTML with ease and reuse components.

2 Follow WCAG guidelines and principles

WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is a set of guidelines and standards that provide recommendations and best practices for making web content accessible to people with various disabilities. WCAG is organized around four principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Each principle has several guidelines and success criteria that you can use to check and improve your app's accessibility. For example, some of the guidelines include providing text alternatives for non-text content, ensuring sufficient color contrast, making all functionality available from a keyboard, providing clear and consistent navigation, and avoiding content that can cause seizures or physical reactions. You can use tools such as the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool or the Lighthouse Accessibility Audit to test your app's compliance with WCAG.

3 Implement responsive and mobile-friendly design

Responsive and mobile-friendly design is a way of designing and developing your app so that it adapts to different screen sizes, resolutions, and orientations. Responsive and mobile-friendly design ensures that your app is usable and accessible on various devices, such as desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Responsive and mobile-friendly design involves using flexible layouts, media queries, breakpoints, and relative units to adjust your app's appearance and behavior according to the device's characteristics. Laravel provides a responsive CSS framework called Bootstrap that you can use to create responsive and mobile-friendly layouts and components.

4 Use Laravel features and packages to enhance usability

Laravel offers many features and packages that can help you enhance the usability of your app. Usability is the degree to which your app is easy to use, learn, and remember for your users. For instance, Laravel Jetstream provides authentication, authorization, profile management, and team management features; Livewire allows you to create dynamic and interactive user interfaces without writing JavaScript code; Breeze is a minimal and simple starter kit for authentication; Fortify is a headless authentication backend that allows you to customize your authentication logic and UI; and UI is a package that provides a basic scaffolding for your app's UI, including Bootstrap, Vue, and React. With these tools, you can ensure that your app is highly usable for all users.