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Comment by philo23 | Hacker News Reader

Not seen anyone mention it yet, but the Accessibility feature in Firefox (might only be available in Nightly/developer edition, not sure) built into the developer tools are pretty good. You need to go into the dev tools settings to enable it from memory.

It gives you access to what is essentially an "accessibility DOM" that shows you how the page's structure will look to a screen reader, and you can also check the contrast of an elements text against its background.

It might not help you score any better on things like the webmaster tools tests directly, but it might help you identify things to change/fix.

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Just checked in Firefox dev tools: there's a top-level menu for Accessibility, but the panel displays a grayed-out message, "Turn On Accessibility Features" which can't be clicked.

Thanks for pointing out this (future) feature, it sounds very useful. I'll keep an eye out for when it's available.

Just had a quick read, looks like it's available since Firefox v63, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Accessibility...

It should work though once you click on that button, weird that it doesn't seem to be working for you.

Edit: Just read through more of that link, it's got quite a good breakdown of the features on it.

Thank you for the link, I bookmarked it to read more in detail. You're right, that's a nice overview of the features. I've always felt the need to learn more about accessibility (and regularly apply it to what I build). This looks great for the purpose.

I found in the browser preferences that I'd checked "Prevent accessibility services from accessing your browser". I had to uncheck it to be able to enable the Accessibility Inspector. Will be exploring it more.

You probably disabled a11y services in about:preferences#privacy

I appreciate the pointer! Yup, indeed, I'd checked "Prevent accessibility services from accessing your browser". I had to uncheck it to be able to enable the Accessibility Inspector.

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