Post

Am I tripping or did Chrome used to have a little icon in the elements panel of the DevTools, a little person in the top right, to quickly open the accessibility tree? That’s gone for me now, and I have to find the accessibility tab to open it. Is there a setting to bring this old icon back?

18/8/26, 9:50 am2 reposts14 likes

@ivancuric.npmx.social

Gotta enable the new tools in experiments

Which of these do I need to enable?

@ivancuric.npmx.social

Huh, there should be one mentioning the accessibility tree. 🤔

Michaël Vanderheyden

It was there. Now it's gone

@duffeh.bsky.social

It now a switch in the accessibility bit in elements.

David Bushell 🪿

bring back the button!

Evil Jim O’Donnell

@eatyourgreens.org.uk

You’re not imagining things but it was removed a few releases ago. I remember because I used it all the time and it vanished, replaced by a toggle in one of the dev console panels.

developer.chrome.com/blog/full-ac... I see the icon in this (dateless, annoyingly) blog post announcing the accessibility tree. It’s a grey square here but I most recently saw it as a blue circle. So at least I’m not completely imagining it.

www.reddit.com/r/accessibil... okay it happened 2 years ago but if you press “a” in the elements tab it toggles, so that’s nice at least. @bram.us any idea why this button was moved? Seems odd, it wasn’t doing any harm where it was.

@lukewarlow.dev

I swear I've used it more recently than 2 years ago? Is there possibly an experiment flag in devtools settings to bring it back?

I went looking but couldn’t see one.

@duffeh.bsky.social

It definitely been there in the recent months.

People complained that the accessibility man was preventing elements in the tree from being right clickable: crbug.com/40813974. I’m personally not convinced of these complaints TBH 🤷‍♂️ (Also: the post _is_ dated. You can find it at the bottom. More recent blog posts now show dates at the top.)

In Canary you can right click the tree and choose “Switch to accessibility tree” from the list of options. (But the `a` shortcut might be easier)

Sara Joy ☠️

I seem to remember getting that button to be there was an experiments flag in the first place? Either way yeah it took me a while to find it again. Thanks for the tip about hitting 'a' - that's great!

There's the little dude in @firefox.com if you miss him ;)

What is Chrome? 😈