Enable Chrome Accessibility Experiment

chrome-a11y-experiment-instructions.md

NOTE: This is no longer an experiment! You can use the accessibility inspector in Chrome Devtools now, including a fantastic color contrast inspection tool. Read more: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/01/devtools#a11y

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Just like any good element inspector helps you debug styles, accessibility inspection in the browser can help you debug HTML and ARIA exposed for assistive technologies such as screen readers. There's a similar tool in Safari (and reportedly one in Edge) but I like the Chrome one best.

As an internal Chrome experiment, this tool differs from the Accessibility Developer Tools extension in that it has privileged Accessibility API access and reports more information as a result. You can still use the audit feature in the Chrome Accessibility Developer Tools, or you could use the aXe Chrome extension. :)

To enable the accessibility inspector in Chrome stable:

1. Go to chrome://flags/#enable-devtools-experiments to enable Devtools experiments
2. Open developer tools, go to Settings (Devtools menu or Chrome customization menu)
3. In Settings, go to Experiments and enable "Accessibility Inspection"
4. Restart developer tools.
5. In the element inspector, a new "Accessibility" tab has been added to "Styles". Use it to inspect accessibility nodes to see an element's computed name, role, etc.

this tool differs from the Accessibility Developer Tools extension in that it has privileged Accessibility API access and reports more information as a result

I was just about to ask this.

Thanks for this 👍

Many developers including myself have long coded without accessibility in mind. thank you for sharing, this is a great way to stay on top of it so it's not forgotten!

@marcysutton Thank you for sharing this. By the way, you may also directly link to chrome://flags/#enable-devtools-experiments instead of just chrome://flags to more easily find the settings.

Also, in Step 3, for others who would initially do it the way I did. Instead of opening Google Chrome's settings, open the settings inside the developer tools accessed by pressingF12 F1.

Best regards!

I needed to restart Chrome after the first step (enabling DevTools experiments). Or else the "Experiments" tab was missing from the settings, so I couldn't do step 3 without restarting.

Thank you. Gracias

@marcysutton looks like this now comes out of the box in Chrome! 🎉 https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/01/devtools#a11y

chrome://flags/#enable-devtools-experiments

Wow! That's really handy êh! +100000 for sharing =D

This seems to have been removed in Chrome v69:

It may have been moved to the audits panel, but that doesn't seem to be useful.

YES. Thats Chrome 72 OS X.

Hi everyone, the Audits tab is different–that runs axe-core as part of Lighthouse for accessibility checks. The functionality in this gist is now in Chrome Devtools proper: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/01/devtools#a11y

Hey everyone, so I was trying to enable devtools experimental in chrome flags and when I type it in or when I click on a link which directs me to that specific setting, I can't find it. All the articles I read on how to enable this setting, all use a mac as their system so I was wondering is this a mac thing, or is this for windows as well? And if it's not a mac thing then how do I fix this problem