Ownership, policies, & key concepts

NoRedInk’s accessibility team, the Accessibilibats, own the noredink-ui package and the Component Catalog app showcasing its components. While others may contribute to noredink-ui and are encouraged to do so, the Accessibilibats (a.k.a. A11ybats) are responsible for oversight of the foundational aspects of the component library, a.k.a. “Component Library Foundations.”

Given this ownership and responsibility, A11ybats will provide guidance and support to developers and designers who are building new components or working with existing components.

The Component Catalog application can be found here.

Component Library Foundations

• Adherence to the component library accessibility policy
• Adherence to the NoRedInk UI Style Guide and Guidelines for Sharing User-Facing Changes with Design
• Interoperability and consistency of components with each other and with the NoRedInk app
• Quality and consistency of API design
• Quality of internal code
• Existence and quality of code documentation for each component
• Existence, quality, and organization of component example pages in the Component Catalog
• Test coverage and testability of each component and of the Component Catalog

Accessibility policy

• No new components will be added to the component library if they do not conform to WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility guidelines. Similarly, no existing components will be modified such that the component falls out of conformance with these guidelines.
• For new components, UX designers & stakeholders are responsible for making their best faith effort to follow the Accessibility Guidelines for Product Development to include accessibility details in their spec and code. A11ybats will help fill in any gaps, but your team is responsible for the first pass.
• Existing components that do not conform to WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility guidelines are being updated by A11ybats to be conformant. (We believe we have a comprehensive backlog of updates to make, but feel free to ask us if you think you spot an accessibility issue. 🙏 )
• Components in the NoRedInk app which are NOT in the component library but which are shared or could be shared across multiple interfaces may be added to the component library over time by A11ybats or by any team, ideally with any necessary accessibility improvements, in accordance with the noredink-ui versioning policy.

Contribution guidelines

What belongs in the component library?

Assume anything that seems like it should be a shared component should probably be a shared component. The remaining contribution guidelines will help you make this determination.

How to contribute

Contributing to the component library is characterized by close consultation with A11ybats, who will make every effort to be available as needed. All contributions require at least a quick check-in with A11ybats, ideally before you begin work and at minimum before you merge any PRs. To that end, A11ybats request that you follow the relevant process outlined below to ensure a streamlined workflow for everyone involved:

🔧 Modifying an existing component

1. As soon as you have a rough idea of the modification you need (from the product/design perspective), please ping A11ybats in the #ask-accessibilibats Slack channel with details about the modification you’re planning to make.
   • We may either give you the okay in the Slack thread, or we may request a brief kickoff sync to discuss implementation details. You may also request a sync rather than providing details in Slack.
   • Once A11ybats give you the go-ahead to begin work…
2. Review the PR template in advance so that you understand contribution requirements in advance, or go ahead and open a draft PR so you can use the PR template as you work.
3. If you are releasing a new major version of a component, be prepared for your team to upgrade all instances of the component anywhere it is used. We recommend creating stories now for this work - we will be asking for links to these stories in your PR!
4. Feel free to reach out to A11ybats with any questions as you work - it might save you headaches or code rewrites later!
5. Request a PR review from your team as usual. There is no need to add A11ybats as a reviewer unless this was mentioned as a requirement in your kickoff sync.
6. A11ybats keep an eye on all noredink-ui updates and may request modifications to your work if it does not adhere to the Component Library Foundations.

🌟 Creating a new component

1. As soon as you have a rough idea of the new component you need (from the product/design perspective), please ping A11ybats in the #ask-accessibilibats Slack channel to request a brief kickoff sync.
   • A11ybats should be able to sync with you anywhere from immediately following your request to ~48 hours from your request. We want to unblock you asap!
   • In the kickoff sync, you can expect to start by sharing your concept with A11ybats. Next, A11ybats will ensure you are aware of our contribution guidelines and will provide high-level guidance about anything important to know before you build your component. For example, in some cases, we may already have existing code that meets your needs or that we prefer you base your new component on. (Hooray! Less work for you!) We may also give you some accessibility pointers.
   • If necessary for more complex work, we’ll schedule followup syncs/pairing with you.
   • Once A11ybats give you the go-ahead to begin work…
2. Feel free to reach out to A11ybats with any questions as you work - it might save you headaches or code rewrites later!
3. Review the PR template in advance so that you understand contribution requirements in advance, or go ahead and open a draft PR so you can use the PR template as you work.
4. Before beginning dev work, we strongly recommend working closely with a UX designer to produce a clear, comprehensive component spec. Here are some tips for developing a good spec before starting component work:
   • UX designers & stakeholders are responsible for making their best faith effort at following the Accessibility Guidelines for Product Development to include accessibility details in their spec and code. A11ybats will help fill in any gaps, but your team is responsible for the first pass.
   • In the spec, include details about which properties need to be configurable and which configuration options are necessary for each property. For example, if your component allows color configurations, you might want developers to specify any hex code as the color, or you may wish to limit them to a particular subset of NoRedInk's colors, etc.
5. If you'd like to have multiple small PRs as you build out the functionality of the component, we recommend branching the small PRs off an omnibus-style component-specific branch instead of branching each small PR off of master.
6. For your initial PR, please request a PR review from your team as usual, but also add A11ybats as an additional PR reviewer.
   • A11ybats will review your PR solely for the purposes of ensuring that your new component adheres to the Component Library Foundations. We may point out bugs if we happen to find them, but that’s not what we’ll be looking for — your team is ultimately responsible for testing/coordinating testing of your new component.
   • For minor iterations on your new component, there’s no need to request A11ybat PR review again. We’ll keep an eye on smaller changes as you make them. If you aren’t sure if your changes are big enough for another A11ybat PR review, just ask!
7. Once your component is in a state that’s ready for production, please request an accessibility review from A11ybats by dropping a note in #ask-accessibilibats. Our turnaround time should be relatively quick, but in the meantime…
8. Start creating a QA Flightplan as if this were a new feature. We recommend requesting that the QA team at least tests your new component within the Component Catalog netlify branch preview. (You can always request additional QA of your component as implemented in the NoRedInk app later.) Simple components may have a simple flightplan, and that’s okay!
9. Once A11ybats have completed their accessibility review, make updates to your QA Flightplan if needed and submit your QA Flightplan to QA according to QA’s processes.
10. When you're ready to publish your component, please refer to the noredink-ui versioning policy, which includes guidance on permitted API changes per release.
11. A11ybats keep an eye on all noredink-ui updates and may request modifications to your work if it does not adhere to the Component Library Foundations.

💫 Adding a component to the Component Catalog

There is a script to help you add your components to the Component Catalog quickly & easily!

Run:

$ script/add-example.sh

And the script will help you wire up an example page. There will still be some TODOs left for you to fill out. Depending on your component's API, you may also need to adjust the generated code a bit for it to compile.

Developing, deploying, & versioning

Getting Started

1. Setup your development environment
2. Run some tests
3. Check out some examples

Developing with Nix

You can develop this package without installing anything globally by using Nix. To get started, install nix from nixos.org/nix.

After that's set up in your shell (just follow the instructions at the end of the installation script) you can run nix-shell to get a development environment with everything you need.

If you find that inconvenient, try using direnv. Once that's set up, echo use nix > .envrc and then direnv allow. Anytime you enter the project your shell will automatically pick up the right dependencies.

If you find that direnv loads too slow, there are faster loading strategies than the default in their wiki.

Working with upstream dependencies

We use nix flake to manage Nix dependencies. It is automatically loaded in the Nix environment.

Here are some things you might need to do:

Task	Action
Add a non-npm, non-Elm dependency packaged with Nix	Look in nixpkgs and add to buildInputs in flake.nix. If it's not in nixpkgs, add a new source.
Update all our dependencies	nix flake update
Update Nixpkgs (or only one dependency)	nix flake lock --update-input nixpkgs
See all our dependencies and sources	Look in flake.nix and flake.lock

Tests

Run tests with

• shake test
• elm-test

You can run the Puppeteer tests for only one component by passing the name of the component to the test script, for example: ./script/puppeteer-tests.sh Button

CI (Travis)

Travis will run shake ci to verify everything looks good. You can run this locally to catch errors before you push!

Reviews & preview environments

Follow the PR template to ensure your PR is reviewed by the appropriate parties.

Netlify provides a preview environment on the web for each PR. You can share the preview environment URL to allow anyone to preview your changes, even if they don't run local code. This allows for easy functional and visual non-code reviews.

To access the preview environment URL, look in the CI area of your PR for the "deploy preview" row. The "Details" link is the preview environment URL. The URL will be something like https://deploy-preview-PrIdNum--noredink-ui.netlify.app/

Examples

This repo contains an app showcasing all of these UI widgets.

To see them locally:

script/develop.sh

And go to http://localhost:8000/

If you'd like to test your widget in the monolith before publishing, run script/test-elm-package.py ../path_to_this_repo from the monolith's directory.

Publishing a new version

Any NoRedInk engineer can deploy a new version of noredink-ui. Generally, we prefer to do a release after every change, rather than trying to batch changes together. This is mostly to make QA more straightforward -- especially for the cases where we make a mistake!

• Make a bump PR
  • Make a new branch off of latest master
  • Run elm diff and verify that the changes are not major (versioning policy) and are what you expect. Copy the diff (you'll paste it into a PR description later.)
  • Run elm bump
    • Getting a "PROBLEM LOADING DOCS" error? See troubleshooting a release
  • Commit the changes to the elm.json file
  • Make a PR and fill out the PR template (this is when you'll paste in the diff you copied earlier!)
• Get your PR merged
• Go to latest master
  • git checkout master
  • git pull
• Run elm publish and follow its prompts
  • Note: when you're asked to create a version tag, please be sure to include a meaningful message! Include details in the message that describe why this noredink-ui version exists at all.
  • Create an annotated tag like this:

  git tag -a 22.x.y -m "Description of this release version: i.e.: 'high-contrast mode highlight style change'"
  

  • Because of branch protection you will not be able to push a tag like: git push origin master 22.x.y (The previous command requires permissions to push directly to master even if you have no changes).
  • Instead, please push your new 22.x.y tag with the following: git push origin 22.x.y

Once you've published, you should see the latest version at https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/NoRedInk/noredink-ui/. It can take a few minutes to show up.

Troubleshooting a release

If you get something like this:

-- PROBLEM LOADING DOCS --------------------------------------------------------

I need the docs for 12.17.0 to compute the next version number, so I fetched:

    https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/NoRedInk/noredink-ui/12.17.0/docs.json

I got the data back, but it was not what I was expecting. The response body
contains 195076 bytes. Here is the beginning:

    [{"name":"Nri.Ui","comment":" A collection of helpers for working with No...

Does this error keep showing up? Maybe there is something weird with your
internet connection. We have gotten reports that schools, businesses, airports,
etc. sometimes intercept requests and add things to the body or change its
contents entirely. Could that be the problem?

Then run it with 0.19.0 explicitly (0.19.1 has some problems with big docs):

npx -p elm@0.19.0-no-deps elm bump

If you encounter issues with using npx, you can manually download and use the Elm 0.19.0 binary as an alternative:

• Download the Elm 0.19.0 binary for Mac
• Extract the file into your project directory.
• Right-click on it, select "Open" from the context menu, and give the necessary permissions for it to run. Note that double-clicking on the file will not request the necessary permissions.
• Run ./elm bump

Versioning policy

We try to avoid breaking changes and the associated major version bumps in this package. The reason for that is to avoid the following scenario:

  |
  x   4.6.0: Adding RadioButton widget
  |
  x   5.0.0: Breaking change in the TextArea widget
  |
  x   5.0.1: Styling fix in the Checkbox widget
  |

Suppose you just released version 5.0.1, a small styling fix in the checkbox widget, for a story you're working on. If the project you're working in currently pulls in noredink-ui at version 4.x, then getting to your styling fix means pulling in a new major version of noredink-ui. This breaks all TextArea widgets across the project, so those will need to be fixed before you can do anything else, potentially a big effort.

To prevent these big Yaks from suddenly showing up in seemingly trivial tasks we prefer to avoid breaking changes in the package. Instead when we need to make a breaking change in a widget, we create a new module for it Nri.Ui.MyWidget.VX. Similarly, when we build custom elements in JavaScript we create a file lib/MyWidget/VX.js and define a custom element nri-mywidget-vX.

That said, we may prune unused modules occasionally.

We should change this process if we feel it's not working for us!