Name: accessibility-inspect
Author: accesslint

One page, hands-on manual tier — drive a live page through the web accessibility (a11y) checks a rule engine can't decide: keyboard operation and focus order, screen-reader names, roles and states from the accessibility tree, reflow and zoom, reduced motion, form errors, and target size. Grades each

This is the semi automated manual tier of a WCAG assessment: the checks that need interaction (keyboard, focus, state changes, reflow) or human review (focus visibility, error recovery, reading order), which a static rule engine can't decide. Work against the running page; use source only to map a finding to file:line . Locate and assess — don't fix (that's accesslint:accessibility fix ). The automated tier is accesslint:accessibility scan ; accesslint:accessibility audit runs both under WCAG EM. The shared rules — severity, the no proxy boundary, high risk patterns, conformance, grounding — are in [ ../shared/methodology.md ](../shared/methodology.md). Read it when a call needs judgment. The rules that always apply are below. Grading Tag each finding with a severity (user impact) and an evidence basis (what you can support). Keep the two separate. ● Verified — deterministic and reproducible. Cite the selector, the interaction, and the observed a11y tree or DOM fact. Without that proof it is not ●. ◐ Flagged — you have evidence, but the decision needs a person. Attach the evidence and your opinion; don't decide it yourself. ○ Human required — needs assistive technology or lived experience. Hand it off; don't emulate it. When unsure between two evidence grades, use the lower one. The icons show evidence basis by fill, not color. A finding that stacks a deterministic fact on an interpretive call takes the lower grade. The machine checkable half (e.g. no programmatic status in the a11y tree — a 1.3.1 fact) is ● evidence inside a ◐ finding; the interpretive conclusion (e.g. that color is the sole carrier of the meaning — 1.4.1) stays ◐. Citing the ● half does not upgrade the whole. Severity (user impact, separate from evidence basis): Critical — blocks a core task, with no workaround. Serious — a major barrier; the task is possible but difficult. Moderate — noticeable friction; the task still completes. Minor — a small inefficiency or polish issue. The ledger — a denominator, not a script The checkpoint areas below are the run's denominator: every criterion in them ends the run in exactly one state, and the report says which. ● verified or ◐/○ flagged — you drove the check and have the evidence. N/A — the triggering feature isn't on the page (no form, no media, no drag UI). Decided from the snapshot; free. Not exercised — the feature is present but you didn't drive it. Reported as undetermined , never silently dropped, and never as a pass. Not exercised is a legitimate, honest outcome and it costs nothing. Drive only what the page's features and the engine's gaps demand; don't work through checkpoints to make the report look thorough. An "undetermined — not exercised" line and a driven and verified line differ in evidence, not in honesty. Dedup before driving, not after: the engine ( accessibility scan ) owns the statically detectable criteria — name/label presence, lang , autocomplete , semantic markup, contrast of text on flat backgrounds. If a scan result set or engine owned SC list was provided (as accessibility audit does), never re check those criteria; ledger them as engine owned. Without one, read what you can from the initial snapshot rather than re deriving what the engine would catch. Area SCs Trigger to drive Keyboard & focus 2.1.1, 2.1.2, 2.4.3, 2.4.7, 2.4.11 Always — one batched walk (below) Structure & semantics 1.3.1, 1.3.2, 2.4.1, 2.4.6 Always — read from the initial snapshot; no extra driving Names, roles, states 4.1.2, 2.5.3, 4.1.3 Custom widgets / stateful controls present (static name presence is engine owned) Visual adaptation 1.4.1, 1.4.4, 1.4.10, 1.4.12, 1.3.4, 2.3.3, 1.4.11 Reflow/zoom on every page (one resize each); motion checks only if motion is present Forms & errors 3.3.1–3.3.3, 1.3.5, 3.3.7, 3.3.8 A form is present (label/ autocomplete presence is engine owned) Media & timing 1.2.x, 2.2.1, 2.2.2 <video / <audio , autoplay, or timeouts present Pointer & target 2.5.1, 2.5.7, 2.5.8 Target size comes free from the batched walk; drag checks only if drag UI Content & navigation 3.1.1/2, 2.4.4, 3.2.3/4, 3.2.6 lang and link purpose from the snapshot; cross page consistency is accessibility audit 's (not exercised here) Per checkpoint procedure and default grades: [ references/checkpoints.md ](references/checkpoints.md). Read it when a triggered area needs its detailed steps, or when the user asks for a deep pass ( deep : drive every triggered area through its full procedure). Evidence budget — cap spend by grade Calibrated uncertainty must be cheaper than false certainty. The grade a finding can reach bounds the evidence worth gathering: ● — full proof, gathered once: selector, interaction, observed DOM or a11y tree fact. Don't repeat an interaction you already recorded. ◐ — hard cap: one selector, one screenshot (only if the question is visual), your opinion, and what a person should confirm. Then stop. A ◐ is re decided by a human whichever way you lean; more evidence doesn't upgrade it to ●, it just costs more. ○ — zero driving: name the functional ability, the assistive technology, and the flow you already exercised. Never drive the page to "strengthen" a ○. Prerequisite: a browser to drive This tier runs through a browser MCP: chrome devtools (recommended), playwright , or puppeteer . If none is connected, run only the static checks, report the rest as ○ handoffs, and tell the user: Target $ARGUMENTS is a URL, an accesslint.config.json target name, or empty for the default target. selector <css scopes to a component; wait for <css waits for async content. navigate page needs a URL, so resolve first: A URL: use it. A target name or empty: read accesslint.config.json (and the gitignored accesslint.config.local.json overlay) and resolve the name (or default ) to its url ; also take its waitFor and selector . No config: ask for a URL, or suggest npx @accesslint/cli init . Then navigate to the URL and wait for the gate ( wait for if given, otherwise the target's waitFor ) before testing. Driving efficiently One snapshot, then scoped reads. Take one full snapshot after the wait gate; it is the basis for structure, names, roles, states, and the N/A decisions. After a state change, don't re snapshot the page — read only the widget that changed, via evaluate script scoped to its selector (or a snapshot of that subtree). A full page re snapshot per interaction is the single largest avoidable cost in this tier. One batched keyboard walk. Traverse focus in a single evaluate script call, not one press key /snapshot cycle per stop: compute the tabbable sequence, focus() each element in order, and return compact JSON per stop — selector, role/name, document.activeElement confirmation, computed outline / box shadow on :focus , bounding box (which settles 2.5.8 for free), and whether the element sits under a sticky/overlay rect (2.4.11). The walk is deterministic DOM fact, so its results are ● citable. The walk finds candidates; real key events confirm behavior. Scripted focus() doesn't run an app's keydown handlers, so operability ( Enter / Space /arrows) and trap claims still need press key — but only at the walk's suspects: composite widgets (roving tabindex, aria activedescendant ), elements whose handlers plausibly capture Tab/Esc, anything the walk couldn't reach. A ● keyboard trap finding needs the real Tab / Esc presses at that widget; it doesn't need them at every widget on the page. High risk patterns For drag and drop, rich text editors, tree views, data grids, custom comboboxes or menus, carousels, and toast or live region heavy UIs, heuristic checks are unreliable. Name the APG pattern, verify what you can (●/◐), and hand off the rest as ○ with the assistive technology steps to run. Use explain rule for engine rules and the APG for widget contracts. Report Group findings by evidence basis; mark severity inline. Close the ledger at the top — every SC in the denominator lands in exactly one bucket — and keep it compact: counts, then bare SC numbers. Group not exercised SCs by shared reason, one parenthetical clause per group, never a line per SC. The report spends its words on failures, flags, and handoffs. A pass is its SC number in the ledger — not a paragraph: no "what passed" narration beyond at most one sentence, and no restating in the recommendations a fix already given on its finding. Ground each entry by selector and visible text. Add file:line (symbol) only when accessibility scan 's source maps provide it; don't guess. Each ○ entry is a handoff: the functional ability and assistive technology needed, plus the flow you exercised. Notes The a11y tree shows machine state, not what a screen reader announces. aria live being present does not mean it announces. Browser zoom isn't exposed; CSS zoom approximations are ◐. Wait for async content before the initial snapshot; after that, prefer selector scoped reads over re snapshots. Composing the tiers (dedup against accessibility scan , one shared browser) is accessibility audit 's job. On its own, this skill reports what its checks find — and its ledger says what they didn't.