The Accessibility Exchange

The Accessibility Exchange is a two-year initiative managed by the Institute for Research and Development on Inclusion and Society (IRIS) that sets out to create an online platform which will support processes where people with disabilities have the power to make sure that policies, programs, and services by federally regulated organizations are accessible to them and respect their human rights. Current consultation processes are built on a foundation of systemic ableism—they lack accountability, follow-through, and don't honour the expertise of people with disabilities.

The Accessibility Exchange platform is co-designed and developed by the Inclusive Design Research Centre at OCAD University.

Technical Details

The platform is built as a progressive web application using the Laravel 9 framework.

Installation

For general deployment information, please see the Laravel 9.x deployment documentation.

The platform requires the following:

• PHP >= 8.1 with required extensions
• MySQL >= 5.7
• Composer >= 2.0
• Node >= 18

Optionally you may wish to install NVM to make node version management easier.

The deployment process should follow all the recommended optimization processes.

Development environments

In development environments, a deployment should be followed by running a fresh migration and the development database seeder:

php artisan migrate:fresh --seeder DevSeeder

NOTE: This will overwrite all existing database tables.

Production environments

In production environments, a deployment should be followed by running all available migrations:

php artisan migrate

Development

Local development uses either the Laravel Sail Docker environment or Laravel Valet.

Local development setup using Laravel Sail

1. Install Docker Desktop.

2. Add an alias to your shell as described here.

3. Fork and clone the project repository (easiest with the Github CLI):

   gh repo fork accessibility-exchange/platform --clone
   cd platform

4. Create a .env file from the included example file:

   cp .env.example .env

   Then, change the APP_ENV value to local:

   APP_ENV=local

5. Generate an encryption key for CipherSweet:

   openssl rand -hex 32

   Add it to your .env file:

   CIPHERSWEET_KEY="<your key>"

6. Start the development environment by running the following command from within the project directory:

   sail up -d

7. Install Composer and NPM dependencies:

   sail composer install
   sail npm install

8. Generate an application key:

   sail artisan key:generate

9. Run the required database migrations:

   sail artisan migrate

10. Download the application fonts:

    sail artisan google-fonts:fetch

For comprehensive instructions, consult the Laravel documentation. Here's an overview of how some key tasks can be carried out using Sail:

• Composer commands may be executed by using sail composer <command>.
• NPM commands may be executed by using sail npm <command>.
• Artisan commands may be executed by using sail artisan <command>.

Local development setup using Laravel Valet

1. Install Homebrew.

2. Install PHP 8.1 via Homebrew:

   brew install php@8.1

3. Install Composer.

4. Install Valet:

   composer global require laravel/valet
   valet install

5. Fork and clone the project repository (easiest with the Github CLI):

   gh repo fork accessibility-exchange/platform --clone
   cd platform

6. Create a .env file from the included example file:

   cp .env.example .env

   Then, change the APP_ENV value to local:

   APP_ENV=local

7. Generate an encryption key for CipherSweet:

   openssl rand -hex 32

   Add it to your .env file:

   CIPHERSWEET_KEY="<your key>"

8. Install Composer and NPM dependencies:

   # install composer dependencies
   composer install
   
   # To use the version of npm specified in .nvmrc.
   # requires https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm
   nvm use
   
   # install node dependencies
   npm ci

9. Generate an application key:

   php artisan key:generate

10. Create a database:

    mysql -uroot -e "create database accessibilityexchange;"

11. Run the required database migrations:

    php artisan migrate

12. Download the application fonts:

    php artisan google-fonts:fetch

13. Tell Valet to serve the application:

    valet link

14. Install Mailhog so that you can access transactional email from the platform:

    brew install mailhog
    brew services start mailhog

    Then, make sure that your .env file contains the following values:

    MAIL_MAILER=smtp
    MAIL_HOST=127.0.0.1
    MAIL_PORT=1025

    You will now be able to access mail that the platform sends by visiting http://127.0.0.1:8025 or http://localhost:8025. For more information and additional configuration options, read this blog post.

For comprehensive instructions, consult the Laravel documentation. Here's an overview of how some key tasks can be carried out using Valet:

• Composer commands may be executed by using composer <command>.
• NVM commands may be executed by using nvm <command>.
• NPM commands may be executed by using npm <command>.
• Artisan commands may be executed by using php artisan <command>.

Running tests

The project uses Pest for testing. For more information about testing Laravel, read the documentation.

Development workflow

• This project uses Conventional Commits, enforced by commitlint. All commit messages and pull request titles must follow these standards.
• The dev branch contains features that have been prototyped and gone through one or more co-design sessions.
• Feature development must take place in a fork, in a branch based on the dev branch. Feature branches must be named according to the format feat/<feature>.
• Before opening a pull request, developers should run composer format && composer analyze && composer test-coverage to ensure that their code is properly formatted, does not cause static analysis errors, and passes tests. Depending on the code coverage, more tests may need to be written to ensure that code coverage does not drop.
  • May need to enabled the XDEBUG coverage mode before running tests, for example XDEBUG_MODE=coverage composer test-coverage.
  • May also want to run the tests in parallel to improve speed, for example php artisan test --parallel or XDEBUG_MODE=coverage php artisan test --coverage --parallel
• Once a feature is ready to merge into dev, the merge must be performed using a squash commit.
• The production branch contains refined features that are considered production-ready.
• Prereleases must be tagged from the dev branch.
• Releases must be tagged from the production branch.

Working with markdown

In other Laravel applications you may see methods such as Str::markdown() and Str::inlineMarkdown() used. In general we attempt to avoid using these methods and instead favour using the provided safe_markdown() and safe_inlineMarkdown helpers. These methods will escape HTML used in a markdown string, strip unsafe links, and escape replacements. They are also tied into the localization system, and will populate their strings into the string packages, just as __() would.

The safe_markdown() and safe_inlineMarkdown() methods should not be called with {!! !!} as their output will safely pass through {{ }}. This provides an additional layer of protection in cases where you may have mixed types output to the template or make a mistake.

{{ safe_markdown('**hello :location**', ['location' => '**World**']) }}
{{-- <p><strong>Hello **World**</strong></p> --}}

If you need to unescape a replacement you can use a ! at the start of the placeholder name (e.g. :!placeholder).

{{ safe_markdown('**hello :!location**', ['location' => '<em>World</em>']) }}
{{-- <p><strong>Hello <em>World</em></strong></p> --}}

There are some cases where you may still wish to use the Str markdown helpers, such as when handling admin input (e.g. resource collection information). In these special cases, make sure to call the Laravel markdown helpers with the SAFE_MARKDOWN_OPTIONS argument to escape HTML and remove unsafe links.

{!! Str::markdown('<em>Hello **World**</em>', SAFE_MARKDOWN_OPTIONS) !!}
{{-- <p>&lt;em&gt;Hello <strong>World</strong>&lt;/em&gt;</p> --}}

Mail notification templates

By default Laravel supports a mixture of markdown and HTML in mail notification templates. However, in this application we've modified the templates to only support HTML. This aligns the behaviour of the mail templates with that of the site's blade templates.

Supported application environments

The application environment is set by specifying the APP_ENV environment variable. See Environment Configuration docs for more information.

APP_ENV	Description
local	For local development; i.e. on a developers machine.
dev	For nightly builds build and deployed from the "dev" branch.
staging	For deploys from the "staging" branch. Used to test changes in a production like environment before going live.
production	For deploys from the "production" branch. The live production released code.

Amongst other things, the application environment can be used to prevent tasks from running or requiring confirmation before running, e.g. in production running php artisan migrate:fresh requires confirmation. It can also be used to limit output in blade templates using the @env() or @production directives (See: Environment Directives docs)

Custom Artisan Commands

db:refresh

NOTE: Excluded from running during tests or on production.

Purpose

• Backs up filament tables to JSON files that are included in the config backup.filament_seeders.tables. [optional, run if --backup is used]
• Runs a fresh migration that will truncate all tables and run all migrations.
• Runs the DevSeeder seeder.

Options

option	Description
--backup	Whether to Backs up filament tables to JSON files that are included in the config backup.filament_seeders.tables.

deploy:global

Purpose

Runs other console commands in order and should be commands that are only run once across multiple deploying container.

deploy:local

Purpose

Runs other console commands in order and should be commands that should be run on each deploying container.

notifications:remove:old

Purpose

Removes older notifications.

Options

option	Description
--days=	*required - The number of days which notifications older than will be deleted from the notifications database table.

db:seed:backup

Purpose

Takes filament tables and backs them up to JSON files so that they can be used by seeders to repopulate the tables.

Options

option	Description
--a|all	Whether to run through all available backups/restores in config.

• When used by itself it backups all the tables found in config backup.filament_seeders.tables.
• When used with --restore option it will run all seeder classed found in backup.filament_seeders.classes.

---

option	Description
--env	Override the environment tag that is being handled.

• Available environments are found in config backup.filament_seeders.environments.
• When used by default backup it will tag the json files with environment tag.
• When used with --delete option will change the files being deleted to those tagged with the specific environment.
• When used with --restore option will restore from files tagged with the environment that you specify.

---

option	Description
--remove	Remove backed up files

• When used by itself it will remove all of the backed up JSON files found in backup.filament_seeders.tables.
• When used with --table= it will remove only the JSON files related to the table(s) (can pass multiple values, each needs to be prefixed by --table=.)

---

option	Description
--restore	Restore the filament table

• Will not run during tests or on production.
• When used without options it will prompt with available classes found in backup.filament_seeders.classes, user can choose multiple by separating choices by commas and will run the chosen seeder classes.
• When used with --all option it will run all seeder classes found in backup.filament_seeders.classes.

---

option	Description
--truncate	Whether to truncate the table before seeding it.

• When used with --restore it will truncate the tables before seeding them.

---

option	Description
--t|table=	Create/remove specific table file

• When used by itself it will backup the specified table(s) to a JSON file (can pass multiple values, each needs to be prefixed by --table=.)
• When used with --remove it will remove only the JSON files related to the table(s) (can pass multiple values, each needs to be prefixed by --table=.)

License

The Accessibility Exchange platform is available under the BSD 3-Clause License.

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