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Something I'm desperately keen to see is AI-assisted accessibility testing. I'm not convinced at all by most of the heuristic-driven ARIA scanning tools. I don

• simonw 11mo ago
  ... I just saw Guidepup has an official GitHub Actions setup action, so that's great news! https://github.com/guidepup/setup-action https://github.com/guidepup/setup-action On macOS it can record audio too.
• PebblesHD 11mo ago
  Rather than improving testing for fallible accessibility assists, why not leverage AI to eliminate the need for them? An agent on your device can interpret the same page a sighted or otherwise unimpaired person would giving you as a disabled user the same experience they would have. Why would that not be preferable? It also puts you in control of how you want that agent to interpret pages.
  • eru 11mo ago
    What you are describing is something the end user can do. What simonw was describing is something the author can do, and end user can benefit whether they use AI or not.
  • simonw 11mo ago
    I'm optimistic that modern AI will lead to future improvements in accessibility tech, but for the moment I want to meet existing screenreader users where they are and ensure the products I build are as widely accessible as possible.
  • K0nserv 11mo ago
    It adds loads of latency for one. If you watch someone who is a competent screen reader user you'll notice they have the speech rate set very high, to you it'll be hard to understand anything. Adding an LLM in the middle of this will add, at least, hundreds of milliseconds of latency to interactions.
  • 8organicbits 11mo ago
    The golden rule of LLMs is that they can make mistakes and you need to check their work. You're describing a situation where the intended user cannot check the LLM output for mistakes. That violates a safety constraint and is not a good use case for LLMs.
  • devinprater 11mo ago
    I, myself, as a singular blind person, would absolutely love this. But we ain't there yet. On-device AI isn't finetuned for this, and neither Apple nor Google have shown indications of working on this in release software, so I'm sure we're a good 3 years away from the first version of this.
• askew 11mo ago
  Guidepup also includes a Virtual Screenreader[1]. [1] https://www.guidepup.dev/docs/virtual https://www.guidepup.dev/docs/virtual
• edflsafoiewq 11mo ago
  Can screen readers emit their narration as text instead of / in addition to audio?
  • devinprater 11mo ago
    Yes, they can. NVDA has a Speech Viewer. VoiceOver (Mac) has the caption panel. NVDA Speech viewer: https://download.nvaccess.org/documentation/userGuide.html#SpeechViewer https://download.nvaccess.org/documentation/userGuide.html#S... Caption Panel: https://support.apple.com/guide/voiceover/use-the-caption-panel-unac078/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/voiceover/use-the-caption-pa...
  • askew 11mo ago
    Yes. Output can be sent to a Braille device too.
• devinprater 11mo ago
  There are thousands of blind people on the net. Can't you hire one of them to test for you? Please?
  • simonw 11mo ago
    Realistically I'm unlikely to do that for my dozens of non-income-generating personal projects. I still want them to be accessible! (The amount of accessibility testing I want to do would bankrupt me very quickly.)
  • m12k 11mo ago
    If you don't want this to break eventually, you need it tested every time your CI/CD test suite runs. Manual testing just doesn't cut it
    • cenamus 11mo ago
      AI in your CI pipeline won't help either then, if it randomly gives different answers
      • simonw 11mo ago
        An AI-generated automated testing script in your pipeline will do great though.
        • debugnik 11mo ago
          And then we're back at your own: > I'm not convinced at all by most of the heuristic-driven ARIA scanning tools.
          • simonw 11mo ago
            That's entirely different. ARIA scanning tools are things that throw an error if they see an element that's missing an attribute, without even attempting to invoke a real screenreader. I'm arguing for automated testing scripts that use tools like Guidepup to launch a real screenreader and assert things like the new content that was added by fetch() being read out to the user after the form submission has completed. I want LLMs and coding agents to help me write those scripts, so I can run them in CI along with the rest of my automated tests.
• throawayonthe 11mo ago
  can we just hire disabled people as testers please
  • simonw 11mo ago
    How about both?
• wouldbecouldbe 11mo ago
  Not a joke. If truly you want a properly functioning website for blind/bad sight/ Step 1 would probably be to put on a blindfold and go through your website with a screenreader (cmd + f5 on a mac).
  • simonw 11mo ago
    Here are notes from last time I tried that: https://tools.simonwillison.net/aria-live-regions https://tools.simonwillison.net/aria-live-regions It's not something I'm comfortable enough with to do on a regular basis though.
    • wouldbecouldbe 11mo ago
      yeah its a real challenge, but probably the only way to really understand it. It's a completely different way of using the web. GPT can really help understand it while doing it.
  • ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
    I would very much like to be better at building websites that handle assistive technologies like screen readers well. I don't have a lot of blind users to worry about because they don't let you be a firefighter if you're blind. But a lot of firefighters are people who simply did not do well in school, even the very senior ones, and that's because they are often very clever people who are of an age where things like dyslexia were just not diagnosed early or often. So now I deal with a lot of people who use assistive technologies to help with dyslexia and related comorbidities. I have dyscalculia that wasn't diagnosed until I was 19 and at uni, and even then it was diagnosed initially by my mate's Educational Psychology undergrad girlfriend in the pub one evening. That was in the early 90s and we're better at it now - but not by much.
    • wouldbecouldbe 11mo ago
      Yeah i don't think it's worth doing for every web app. But I do think it's fair that for instance government websites try to meet these criteria.
• api 11mo ago
  What about just AI assisted accessibility? Like stop requiring apps to do anything at all. The AI visually parses the app UI for the user, explains it, and interacts. Accessible is an also-have at best for the vast majority of software. This would open a lot more software to blind users than is currently available.
  • simonw 11mo ago
    That's expensive, slow (listen to a screenreader user some time to see how quickly they operate) and likely only works online. I'm also not going to shirk my responsibilities as a developer based on a hope that the assistive tech will improve.
    • api 11mo ago
      It’s expensive for now, slow for now, online for now, but it’s pretty clear that this is the future. If I were blind I’d want it to go here since it would just unlock so much more. Very little software or sites have good accessibility. Open source and indie stuff often has none. A custom local model trained only for this task seems like a possibility, and could be way smaller than some general purpose model being instructed for this task. I’m thinking screen reader and UI assist only. Could probably be like a 7B quantized model. Maybe smaller.
• jillesvangurp 11mo ago
  A more viable path might actually be agentic testing via agents that simply use a browser or screen reader that can work off high level test scenarios. I've done some UI testing via the agent mode in chat gpt and I got some pretty decent feedback out of that. I've been trying to do more of that. Accessibility testing might require a bit more additional tooling than comes with chat gpt by default. But otherwise, this could work.
• klysm 11mo ago
  There might be a great use case here, but the economics make me nervous. Don't the same problems apply here for why we don't have great accessibility? Who is paying for it? How do I justify the investment (AI or not) to management?
• Moto7451 11mo ago
  I’m doing a PoC at work with Workback.ai, which is essentially what you’re asking about. So far it’s early but it seems ok at first brush. We have a firm we pay for traditional accessibility assessments, remediation, and VPATs and my expectation is that the AI tooling does not replace them due to how business needs and product design interact with accessibility. I.e. ChatGPT and Cursor can probably remediate adding screen reader support for a solving a Captia for the blind, but do you want to really do that? There’s likely a better design for the blind. Either way, I agree. This is a big area where there can be real impact in the industry. So far we’ve gotten scans back in record time compared to human in the loop scans.
• westont5 11mo ago
  The agent-driving-a-screenreader footgun is that it's quite easy to build UI that creates a reasonable screereader UX, but unintentionally creates accessibility barriers for other assistive technologies, like voice control. Ex: a search control is built as <div aria-label="Search"><input type="search"/></div>. An agent driving a screenreader is trying to accomplish a goal that requires search. Perhaps it tries using Tab to explore, in which case it will hear "Search, edit blank" when the input is focused. Great! It moves on. But voice control users can't say "click Search". That only works if "Search" is in the control's accessible name, which is still blank, the outer div's aria-label has no effect on components it wraps. Would an agent catch that nuance? Would you? You could realign to "I want to know if my features work for screenreader, voice control, switch, keyboard, mobile keyboard [...] users", but you can imagine the inverse, where an improvement to the voice control UX unintentionally degrades the screenreader UX. Accessibility is full of these tensions, I worry an multi-agent approach would result in either the agents or you getting bogged down by them. I think a solution needs to incorporate some heuristics, if you consider WCAG a heuristic. For all its faults, a lot of thought went into rules that balance the tensions reasonably well. I used to be more of the "forget WCAG, just show me the UX" attitude, but over the years I've come to appreciate the baseline it sets. To the example above, 2.5.3 Label in Name clearly guides you towards setting an accessible name (not description) on the search itself, patching up support for screenreaders and voice control. Not that WCAG concerns itself with the details of ARIA (it packs all that complexity into the vague "accessibility supported"[1]). We do need more seamless ways of quickly evaluating whether ARIA or whatever markup pattern has the intended rendering in screen readers, voice control, etc, but at a level that's already constrained. In the example, WCAG should apply its constraints first. Only then should we start running real screen readers and analyzing their audio, and to avoid the footguns that analysis should be at a low level ("does the audio rendering of this control reasonably convey the expected name, state, value, etc?"), not a high level ("does the audio rendering contain the info necessary to move to the next step?"). Unfortunately both agents and heuristic-driven accessibility scanning tools struggle to apply WCAG today. Agents can go deeper than scanners, but they're inconsistent and in my experience really have trouble keeping 55+ high level rules in mind all the time. In the example, an agent would need to use the accessibility tree to accomplish its goal and need to reject a node with label "Search" containing a role=textbox as an option for searching (or at least flag it), which is made trickier by the fact that sometimes it _is_ ok to use container labels to understand context. I think the answer might be to bundle a lot of those concerns into an E2E test framework, have the agent write a test it thinks can accomplish the goal, and enter a debug loop to shake out issues progressively. Ex: if the agent needs to select the search control for the task, and the only allowed selector syntax requires specifying the control's accessible name (i.e. Playwright's getByRole()), will the agent correctly get blocked? And say the control does have an accessible name, but has some ARIA misconfigurations — can the test framework automatically run against some real screenreaders and report an issue that things aren't working as expected? We've done some explorations on the framework side you might be interested in [2]. [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/#dfn-accessibility-supported https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/#dfn-accessibility-supported [2] https://assistivlabs.com/articles/automating-screen-readers-for-accessibility-testing https://assistivlabs.com/articles/automating-screen-readers-...