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Accessibility

The Accessibility class provides methods for inspecting Chromium's accessibility tree. The accessibility tree is used by assistive technology such as screen readers or switches.

Accessibility is a very platform-specific thing. On different platforms, there are different screen readers that might have wildly different output.

Rendering engines of Chromium, Firefox and WebKit have a concept of "accessibility tree", which is then translated into different platform-specific APIs. Accessibility namespace gives access to this Accessibility Tree.

Most of the accessibility tree gets filtered out when converting from internal browser AX Tree to Platform-specific AX-Tree or by assistive technologies themselves. By default, Playwright tries to approximate this filtering, exposing only the "interesting" nodes of the tree.

Deprecated​

SnapshotAsync​

Added in: v1.8 accessibility.SnapshotAsync
Deprecated

This method is deprecated. Please use other libraries such as Axe if you need to test page accessibility. See our Node.js guide for integration with Axe.

Captures the current state of the accessibility tree. The returned object represents the root accessible node of the page.

note

The Chromium accessibility tree contains nodes that go unused on most platforms and by most screen readers. Playwright will discard them as well for an easier to process tree, unless interestingOnly is set to false.

Usage

An example of dumping the entire accessibility tree:

var accessibilitySnapshot = await page.Accessibility.SnapshotAsync();
Console.WriteLine(System.Text.Json.JsonSerializer.Serialize(accessibilitySnapshot));

An example of logging the focused node's name:

var accessibilitySnapshot = await page.Accessibility.SnapshotAsync();
Console.WriteLine(System.Text.Json.JsonSerializer.Serialize(accessibilitySnapshot));

Arguments

  • options AccessibilitySnapshotOptions? (optional)

    • InterestingOnly bool? (optional)#

      Prune uninteresting nodes from the tree. Defaults to true.

    • Root ElementHandle? (optional)#

      The root DOM element for the snapshot. Defaults to the whole page.

Returns