A green support table doesn't mean everyone can use it. Here's a 2026 accessibility check on popover, anchor positioning, dialog, and view transitions — and what you still have to do yourself for each.
This is Part 18 of the “Frontend Testing, Done Right” series. Browse the full series · Glossary Open a coverage report and four numbers stare back — Stmts, Branch, Funcs, Lines. Which one matters? This article is about reading that report: which number is honest (spoiler: branch), what to fill in from the red lines, and where to look for the team health that numbers can’t show. If you’ve been following the series, this is the hands-on follow-up to the strategy part’s point that “coverage is a reference, not a target.” First time here from a search? That’s fine too — we use Vitest, but reading a report works the same no matter which tool you’re on. ...
This is Part 17 of the “Frontend Testing, Done Right” series. Browse the full series · Glossary Tests have no power while they’re “something you run locally, sometimes.” They protect a team only once they become a checkpoint that runs on every PR. This article builds that checkpoint with GitHub Actions — a merge gate where unit tests, E2E, and accessibility checks must pass before code can merge — from a single workflow file. Never touched CI? Fine. Three minutes of vocabulary first. ...
This is Part 16 of the “Frontend Testing, Done Right” series. Browse the full series · Glossary Ever had every test green while the screen was broken? Logic fine, one CSS rule collapsing the layout? Visual regression testing stores a reference screenshot (the baseline) and compares pixels, automatically catching “regressions only eyes can see.” It’s built into Playwright — one line to start — but there’s a knack to stable shots and an ambush called environment differences. All covered here. ...
This is Part 15 of the “Frontend Testing, Done Right” series. Browse the full series · Glossary Whether a button has a name, you can tell by looking at that button. But whether its text contrasts enough with the background, whether the page declares a language, whether an id is duplicated — you can’t tell from one element. You have to look at the whole screen, and at the state it’s actually rendered in. That’s tiring to do by eye every time, which is exactly why you want an automated checking engine. ...
This is Part 14 of the “Frontend Testing, Done Right” series. Browse the full series · Glossary “Works on my machine, red on CI.” The homework of everyone who operates E2E, and the prime cause of console.log wallpaper. Playwright ships three tools that solve this mystery with evidence: traces that rewind the failure whole, a UI mode that time-travels, and retries used as a signal. We pack all three today. Series readers: this is insurance for the day your E2E breaks. Searchers: this is the emergency kit for the test that’s broken right now. Examples are self-contained. ...
This is Part 13 of the “Frontend Testing, Done Right” series. Browse the full series · Glossary Past ten E2E tests, two things start to hurt: the setup code copy-pasted into every test, and the suite slowing down as it runs in sequence. Playwright’s fixtures (a mechanism that injects repeated setup into tests) and parallel execution solve both at once — this article covers custom fixtures, auth reuse (storageState), and the safety rules for parallelism. ...
I had clearly written a dark gray into my CSS. color: #595959. On a white background that color has a contrast of 6.4:1, which comfortably clears the accessibility bar of 4.5:1. Pass. Then I ran an accessibility checker, and a red line appeared. This text has a contrast of 4.04:1, which is insufficient. Expected ratio: 4.5:1. I put in a color that measures 6.4:1, so why is it calling it 4:1? Was the checker wrong? ...
This is Part 12 of the “Frontend Testing, Done Right” series. Browse the full series · Glossary Flaky tests — the code hasn’t changed, yet some days it passes and some days it fails. It’s the first illness every team catches when adopting E2E, and left untreated it breeds a scary culture: “that one again? just rerun it.” Fortunately the cause is usually singular: finding elements too early, or the wrong way. This article pulls that root out with Playwright’s locators and auto-wait. ...
Some people set their screen to maximum contrast. Yellow text on black, white text on blue, that sort of thing. For low-vision users this is the difference between being able to read the text and not; people with migraines or light sensitivity go the other way, using a muted, low-contrast palette. They have one thing in common — the user decides the colors. And the moment they do, a good chunk of the colors we wrote in CSS get ignored. ...