NOTE: This is no longer an experiment! You can use the accessibility inspector in Chrome Devtools now, including a fantastic color contrast inspection tool. Read more: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/01/devtools#a11y
Just like any good element inspector helps you debug styles, accessibility inspection in the browser can help you debug HTML and ARIA exposed for assistive technologies such as screen readers. There's a similar tool in Safari (and reportedly one in Edge) but I like the Chrome one best.
As an internal Chrome experiment, this tool differs from the Accessibility Developer Tools extension in that it has privileged Accessibility API access and reports more information as a result. You can still use the audit feature in the Chrome Accessibility Developer Tools, or you could use the aXe Chrome extension. :)
To enable the accessibility inspector in Chrome stable:
- Go to chrome://flags/#enable-devtools-experiments to enable Devtools experiments
- Open developer tools, go to Settings (Devtools menu or Chrome customization menu)
- In Settings, go to Experiments and enable "Accessibility Inspection"
- Restart developer tools.
- In the element inspector, a new "Accessibility" tab has been added to "Styles". Use it to inspect accessibility nodes to see an element's computed name, role, etc.
I needed to restart Chrome after the first step (enabling DevTools experiments). Or else the "Experiments" tab was missing from the settings, so I couldn't do step 3 without restarting.