Accessibility tree visualizer: a DevTools proposal

[spectranaut]

In the ARIA face to face meeting in may 2023 we discussed the desire for a an accessibility tree "visualizer" to help developers understand the users experience mediated by the accessibility tree.

This could show things like:

• landmarks
• the accessible name of UI components
• the order of interactive items
• show the result of live region updates.

It seems like a utility like this should be build into browser devtools.

[stes-acc]

There are a number of MS Inspect clones out there that do that native for the platform Accessibility APIs. The feature set definition could also be interesting for those.

[brennanyoung]

Is the "Accessibility Tree View" in chromium dev tools lacking anything? I find it very useful.

(Attached image is a screenshot of the "Accessibility Tree View" in chromium dev, with an arrow pointing at the toggle that enables it)

[stevefaulkner]

@brennanyoung all of the in browser acc tree tools lack some info for example, the associated headers for a data cell are not exposed, to find this information you will need to use an app such as inspect.exe or accprobe.exe

[spectranaut]

The actual goal of this was something slightly different -- by a "visualizer" we mean something that shows all the accessibility objects layout out somehow visually, in the order they would be encountered with a screen reader, with the accessible name prominent, regions prominent, boundaries etc. Also maybe a way to see live region updates. The idea is to make it quicker/easier to understand, for visual developers, the "layout" the accessibility tree, if that makes sense.

[brennanyoung]

Interesting, useful idea, and not trivial! But I don't really see it as part of the ARIA effort.

[Malvoz]

• show the result of live region updates

FWIW there's a Chromium bug for that, although it was archived today: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1260618

[spectranaut]

Interesting, useful idea, and not trivial! But I don't really see it as part of the ARIA effort.

That might be true, maybe this issue is more about brainstormming who we might try to convince to do it.