Chromium accessibility tools

[Alexander Surkov]

Hi!

I've been working lately on ax_dump_tree and ax_dump_event accessibility tools and have managed to make a bunch of improvements. I thought it might be nice to make a recap for the latest changes.

The tools:

ax_dump_tree allows you to dump an accessible tree of an application;

ax_dump_events allows you to listen to accessible events from an application.

These are command line cross-platform tools and available on Linux, Mac and Windows platforms.

These tools are great when:

* (web authors) you need to inspect an accessible tree for a website/test case, or when you need to check which accessibility events are fired; it's helpful to learn how a certain feature is exposed to the assistive technologies;

* (browser developers) you need to compare accessible trees/events between browsers. It’s helpful when you need to figure out why a screen reader works in one browser and doesn’t work in another.

* (spec authors) it’s useful to find implementation gaps and inconsistencies.

A bunch of pre-defined selectors are supported to work with the browsers. Use:

* --chrome and --chromium for Chrome/Chromium

* --edge for Edge

* --firefox for Firefox

* --safari for Safari

--active-tab to scope to a web document content.

For example, to dump Chromium accessible tree you simply do:

ax_dump_tree --chromium

You can also inspect any application by using --pid=application_pid or --pattern=application_title arguments. Here's full docs [1].

Also I've blogged about these tools trying to sketch up how the tools can evolve. Here is a link [2] in case if you are curious.

Thanks!

Alexander.

[1] https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/master:tools/accessibility/inspect/README.md

[2] https://alexsurkov.medium.com/hidden-gem-of-chromium-accessibility-d0c38e0210b0