jargon

Frontend & browser·Accessibility and semantics

you opened the accessibility panel and saw what a screen reader sees, which was not what you drew.

Accessibility tree

Also calleda11y tree, AOM

The parallel tree the browser derives from the DOM, holding each node's role, name, state and value — the version of your interface assistive technology consumes. Elements can be present in the DOM and absent from it, or present with a role you did not intend. Inspecting it directly turns accessibility from guesswork into reading the output, which is why the devtools panel is the fastest tool in this whole section.

Commonly confused with