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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.

snapshot

def snapshot(interestingOnly: nil, root: nil)

:::warning

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:

snapshot = page.accessibility.snapshot
puts snapshot

An example of logging the focused node’s name:

def find_focused_node(node)
  if node['focused']
    node
  else
    node['children']&.find do |child|
      find_focused_node(child)
    end
  end
end

snapshot = page.accessibility.snapshot
node = find_focused_node(snapshot)
puts node['name']