Visual Accessibility Auditing Across Interaction States And Reading Orders

Automated accessibility checkers evaluate a single snapshot of a page, but many barriers emerge only over multiple interactions, not in a single static state. Several WCAG~2.2 criteria depend on geometry, focus state, or interaction history, such as a button that becomes obscured once a sticky header appears. Others arise when the visual layout, the screen-reader order, and the keyboard (Tab) order of a page disagree, so different users encounter the same content in conflicting sequences. Auditing these requires reasoning about geometry and structure alongside the live page, which makes it both a detection and a visualization problem. We present Site Accessibility Auditor, a Chrome DevTools extension with two coordinated lenses. The interaction lens automatically drives the page through its reachable states and overlays interaction-dependent issues as inspectable visual evidence on a full-page capture. The reading & focus order lens aligns the visual, screen-reader, and keyboard orders, shows where they diverge, and suppresses intentional patterns such as skip links. We evaluate the extension from two vantage points: as site owners and as an external auditor. In a design partnership with the Utah Wastewater Surveillance System dashboard, our tool motivated the team to ship accessibility fixes. We used the tool on the Our World in Data site, showing that the approach runs on an unmodified, in-the-wild site.

Md Rahat-uz- Zaman, Jake Wagoner, Tingying He, Alexander Lex, and Paul Rosen. Visual Accessibility Auditing Across Interaction States And Reading Orders. IEEE VIS AccessViz Workshop, 2026.

@inproceedings{zaman2026visual,
  title = {Visual Accessibility Auditing Across Interaction States and Reading Orders},
  author = {Zaman, Md Rahat-uz- and Wagoner, Jake and He, Tingying and Lex, Alexander and
    Rosen, Paul},
  booktitle = {IEEE VIS AccessViz Workshop},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Automated accessibility checkers evaluate a single snapshot of a page, but
    many barriers emerge only over multiple interactions, not in a single static state.
    Several WCAG~2.2 criteria depend on geometry, focus state, or interaction history, such
    as a button that becomes obscured once a sticky header appears. Others arise when the
    visual layout, the screen-reader order, and the keyboard (Tab) order of a page disagree,
    so different users encounter the same content in conflicting sequences. Auditing these
    requires reasoning about geometry and structure alongside the live page, which makes it
    both a detection and a visualization problem. We present Site Accessibility Auditor, a
    Chrome DevTools extension with two coordinated lenses. The interaction lens
    automatically drives the page through its reachable states and overlays
    interaction-dependent issues as inspectable visual evidence on a full-page capture. The
    reading & focus order lens aligns the visual, screen-reader, and keyboard orders, shows
    where they diverge, and suppresses intentional patterns such as skip links. We evaluate
    the extension from two vantage points: as site owners and as an external auditor. In a
    design partnership with the Utah Wastewater Surveillance System dashboard, our tool
    motivated the team to ship accessibility fixes. We used the tool on the Our World in
    Data site, showing that the approach runs on an unmodified, in-the-wild site.}
}