There's a question people ask almost every time we talk with a team about their accessibility needs: how do we see just the effect of specific code changes, not the full report of all current accessibility issues?
This comes up because everybody's been through a specific kind of pain in their accessibility remediation work, where fixing one issue can expose, or even directly cause, another problem. At same time, incoming UI changes can silently introduce issues that could have been caught and prevented before merging. Both kinds of problems may only noticed later after they have become "load bearing" and harder to fix.
Combined with typically long feedback cycles around accessibility solutions, this can lead to a disappointing outcome where accessibility fixes don't have the intended impact on the independence and success of end users, and reduces confidence in the accessibility process and the automation pipeline.
The good news
Using Branch Review in Cypress Cloud, you can now compare any two Cypress Accessibility reports, and understand exactly what has changed between two builds of your application, or two points in time where content has been modified. Just like Cypress Accessibility itself, this process is powered fully by your existing Cypress tests with no set up required, and no impact on performance or test flakiness.
This will help you deploy faster, speed up the code review process, and reduce accessibility-related "followup" work. We expect this to become one of the main ways people use Cypress Accessibility going forward, because it dramatically reduces the "surface area" of an accessibility report, to just the items affected by a particular change in code or content.
Check out the video below to see this in action, and learn more about the details in our documentation.
Cypress Accessibility trial
If you are interested in trying this for yourself, contact us for a free trial of Cypress Accessibility.