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?

Sam Rose

@samwho.dev

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.

18/8/26, 9:55 am0 reposts2 likes

Sam Rose

@samwho.dev

18 Aug

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.

Luke

@lukewarlow.dev

18 Aug

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?

Sam Rose

@samwho.dev

18 Aug

I went looking but couldn’t see one.

Duffeh

@duffeh.bsky.social

18 Aug

It definitely been there in the recent months.

Bramus

@bram.us

18 Aug

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.)

Bramus

@bram.us

18 Aug

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)

Michaël Vanderheyden

@th3s4mur41.me

18 Aug

But that is basically just the accessibility tree from that element a'd children, right? Not the full document tree we used to have. Although looking at it on the body might be similar 🤔