How To Add An Aria Label To An Element in Flutter Web

August 24, 2024

3 minutes

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How To Add An Aria Label To An Element in Flutter Web

When working with Flutter Web, you might encounter a situation where certain elements on your web application are not easily accessible or interactable, during automation testing. For example, you might find that you can’t interact with specific icons or widgets through automated scripts. To address this issue and enhance your testing reliability, adding the aria-label to these elements can be incredibly useful and that’s what we’ll focus on it this post.

Futter Web Element Not Inspectable

In my Flutter project, I faced a similar challenge with the favorite icon. This icon was not interactable when trying to write my cypress test script, making it difficult to verify its visibility.

Using Flutter Widget Inspetor To Find Element

To solve this, I used the Flutter Widget Inspector to locate the element within the code. The Widget Inspector is a powerful tool in Flutter that allows you to visually inspect the UI elements of your application, making it easier to identify the code responsible for a specific widget.

Once I identified the favorite icon in the code, the next step was to wrap this element with a Semantics widget.

Dart

// Home page landing actions favorite button
_widgetAnimatorBuilder(
millisecondDelay: 2900,
child: Icon(
  FontAwesome.heart,
  color: colorPalette.accent4,
   ),
),

Adding Semantic Label To Element

The Semantics widget in Flutter is designed to annotate widgets with additional semantic information, which is crucial for accessibility and automation testing. By wrapping the favorite icon with the Semantics widget, I could add the label property, providing a textual description that automated testing tools can use to interact with the element reliably.

When adding a label to the Semantics widget, it’s important to choose a unique and descriptive name for the aria label. This ensures that the automation testing scripts can easily identify and interact with the correct element on the page. In my case, I opted to use favorite-heart-icon as the aria label.

Dart

// Home page landing actions favorite button
_widgetAnimatorBuilder(
  millisecondDelay: 2900,
  child: Semantics(
    label: 'favorite-heart-icon',
    child: Icon(
      FontAwesome.heart,
      color: colorPalette.accent4,
    ),
  ),
)

Flutter Element Inspectable With Aria Label

Save you changes and let’s hot restart our project to see the changes. If everything went well, should be able to to inspect this element and see the aria-label set to favorite-heart-icon.

Conclusion

By adding aria labels to elements like the favorite icon, you not only improve the accessibility of your Flutter web application but also enhance the reliability of your automation testing. With a well-labeled element, testing scripts can interact with specific parts of your application more effectively, leading to more accurate and dependable test results. This simple but effective strategy ensures that every user, regardless of their abilities, can engage with your application, and your automated tests can efficiently verify its functionality.

Tags : flutter