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.

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Deprecated

snapshot

Added before v1.9 accessibility.snapshot

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 interesting_only is set to false.

Usage

An example of dumping the entire accessibility tree:

Sync

snapshot = page.accessibility.snapshot()
print(snapshot)

Async

snapshot = await page.accessibility.snapshot()
print(snapshot)

An example of logging the focused node's name:

Sync

def find_focused_node(node):
    if node.get("focused"):
        return node
    for child in (node.get("children") or []):
        found_node = find_focused_node(child)
        if found_node:
            return found_node
    return None

snapshot = page.accessibility.snapshot()
node = find_focused_node(snapshot)
if node:
    print(node["name"])

Async

def find_focused_node(node):
    if node.get("focused"):
        return node
    for child in (node.get("children") or []):
        found_node = find_focused_node(child)
        if found_node:
            return found_node
    return None

snapshot = await page.accessibility.snapshot()
node = find_focused_node(snapshot)
if node:
    print(node["name"])

Arguments

• interesting_only 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

• NoneType | Dict#

  • role str

    The role.

  • name str

    A human readable name for the node.

  • value str | float

    The current value of the node, if applicable.

  • description str

    An additional human readable description of the node, if applicable.

  • keyshortcuts str

    Keyboard shortcuts associated with this node, if applicable.

  • roledescription str

    A human readable alternative to the role, if applicable.

  • valuetext str

    A description of the current value, if applicable.

  • disabled bool

    Whether the node is disabled, if applicable.

  • expanded bool

    Whether the node is expanded or collapsed, if applicable.

  • focused bool

    Whether the node is focused, if applicable.

  • modal bool

    Whether the node is modal, if applicable.

  • multiline bool

    Whether the node text input supports multiline, if applicable.

  • multiselectable bool

    Whether more than one child can be selected, if applicable.

  • readonly bool

    Whether the node is read only, if applicable.

  • required bool

    Whether the node is required, if applicable.

  • selected bool

    Whether the node is selected in its parent node, if applicable.

  • checked bool | "mixed"

    Whether the checkbox is checked, or "mixed", if applicable.

  • pressed bool | "mixed"

    Whether the toggle button is checked, or "mixed", if applicable.

  • level int

    The level of a heading, if applicable.

  • valuemin float

    The minimum value in a node, if applicable.

  • valuemax float

    The maximum value in a node, if applicable.

  • autocomplete str

    What kind of autocomplete is supported by a control, if applicable.

  • haspopup str

    What kind of popup is currently being shown for a node, if applicable.

  • invalid str

    Whether and in what way this node's value is invalid, if applicable.

  • orientation str

    Whether the node is oriented horizontally or vertically, if applicable.

  • children List[Dict]

    Child nodes, if any, if applicable.