Shifting Left with Cypress End-to-End Accessibility Tests

Ensuring accessibility in a modern design system shouldn’t be a last‑minute checklist item; it should be an automated, repeatable part of your development workflow. In this session, we’ll explore how to integrate accessibility testing directly into your component development lifecycle using Cypress and tools like cypress-axe to flag issues before they ever reach production.

We’ll demo a practical setup for testing individual web components within a site theme, demonstrating how to make writing tests easier and check for accessibility/usability issues that go beyond what automated checkers catch. We'll also show how to run these same tests in GitHub Actions. You’ll learn how to set up actions like automatic triggers of tests and blocking merge requests with violations, so you can maintain a scalable accessibility pipeline as your component library grows.

Whether you're building a new design system or leveling up an existing one, this session will provide a clear workflow, sample test patterns, and practical lessons you can immediately apply to your development environment.