Show HN: Visualization of website accessibility tree

[ziolko]

When COVID-19 started I needed something to get busy to not go crazy. I happened to work on our app WCAG compliance for a few months at the time and was frustrated by the state of of accessibility-related tools for developers.

I've spend two months delivering a tool that is easy to understand and helps catching accessibility issues on my apps. A few years later it's pretty popular despite being mostly abandoned.

I will be happy to work on this further but honestly lost my enthusiasm some time ago. I'd love to get in touch with some company in the accessibility testing space and discuss how to improve it.

[yreg]

Thank you, this looks great!

Could you please run it inside iframes as well? Being able to use this in the Storybook/Playroom would be awesome.

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Firefox link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/aria-devtools...

[ziolko]

I am super glad you like it! The primary reason I haven't introduced support for iframes is that it requires much wider permissions (instead of just access to the current tab after clicking the "ARIA DevTools" icon you'd need to grant access to all data on every website you visit). I will research if things changed since I last checked, though.

[InvisGhost]

I wonder if you're able to open the iframe in a new tab and then use the extension on it?

[notjustanymike]

A very handy tool for spot checking, but also training. My benefit from this visualization will be demonstrating to non-technical how to people to think about accessibility (specifically screen readers). Half the challenge with WCAG is getting our stakeholders to think beyond ticking boxes for compliance.

[Muromec]

"but it's already a text, can't screenreader read the text?"

[_bin_]

this kind of makes sense though? if 98% of your users can use a non-accessible site just fine - which, since heavy computer users are mostly young, is realistic - why would you go beyond checkboxes? it's a negative EV move.

[kilian]

Very cool. I recently implemented my own accessibility tree visualization [1] Yours is very interesting, getting away from the tree itself to a visualization more focused on grouping discrete units.

My thinking was to show the entire structure and through that help people focus on a logical flow through the page. Flipping that around and thinking of the tree as a set of discrete blocks, where the cohesion inside each block is more important, is very interesting.

Happy to chat if you want to compare notes!

[1] https://polypane.app/blog/polypane-20-1-the-accessibility-tr...

[vladde]

Looks neat, and way more clean than https://wave.webaim.org/

[ziolko]

Thank you! I really think there's a lot of potential in ARIA DevTools. It's quite popular (at least for my standards) but I never had any connection with people that live and breathe web accessibility. And the devil is in the details here so to be fully fair, WAVE is most probably more accurate.

[afloatboat]

Pretty clean, I like it.

I tested it out on a page I'm developing that has some meta data on a TV show. One of the elements is a set of divs each containing span with an `aria-label` describing the contents. With MacOs' VO this gets called out correctly, and Chrome's Accessibility Tree also picks this up, but this tool doesn't show the `aria-label`, it just shows the separate values as strings one after another.

It also picked up a `::before { content: ", " / ""; }` as `, value`, but that's not supported very well in general.

[ziolko]

Is there a chance to get a link to the page? I'd love to try it out and fix.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Good stuff!

I'm big on accessibility support.

Web sites aren't really my deal, anymore, but I always used to make sure that my sites were very accessible, when it was my deal.

[ximm]

One thing we I wish we would do with these tools is separate all the aria logic from the UI. We should put all that complex aria stuff into a library and then build different UIs on top of a shared, well tested code base.

Shameless plug: https://github.com/xi/aria-api

[Someone]

How does this compare to Chrome’s built-in tooling (https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/accessibility/ref...)?

[ziolko]

When I designed the tool I've tried to mirror the experience of screen readers users instead of only displaying ARIA roles and properties.

For example you have to navigate the page with your keyboard only. If a dropdown isn't accessible - it's instantly clear for the user. Another example are tables. They present only one cell + their headers at the time. I think it's super close to the actual experience of screen reader users.

[freetonik]

Great idea and implementation, thank you, I’ll definitely use it for my side project. Coincidentally, I just watched a talk by Mandy Michael [1] about HTML performance and accessibility, and was wondering if there is a tool nicer than browser’s built in accessibility tree viewer.

1. https://youtu.be/cghb0VpCJqM?si=5pWNrkPOyUsohyGJ

[danng87]

Awesome tool!

I've been diving more into accessibility lately, especially trying to improve the experience for screen reader users. For those with more experience, has anyone tested this tool on more complex scenarios like extensive forms or dynamic tables? I'd love to hear how it compares to other accessibility tools in those cases.

Any tips or insights would be appreciated!

[Evan-Purkhiser]

I’ve been using this for years now thank you so much for building this!!

[ziolko]

I am glad to see a happy user here! :)

[antriani_]

Does it offer any additional features compared to the accessibility view in Chrome DevTools?

[Leimi]

Super useful, great job.