No ARIA is better than bad ARIA

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't want to know if my app appears to have the right ARIA attributes set - I want to know if my features work for screenreader users.

What I really want is for a Claude Code style agent to be able to drive my application in an automated fashion via a screenreader and record audio for me of successful or failed attempts to achieve goals.

Think Playwright browser tests but for popular screenreaders instead.

Every now and then I check to see if this is a solved problem yet.

I think we are close. https://www.guidepup.dev/ looks extremely promising - though I think it only supports VoiceOver on macOS or NVDA on Windows, which is a shame since asynchronous coding agent tools like Codex CLI and Claude Code for web only run Linux.

What I haven't seen yet is someone closing the loop on ensuring agentic tools like Claude Code can successfully drive these mechanisms.

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.