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I'm trying to use the Chrome Devetools element inspector for the purposes of accessibility audits. if i open the devtools menu and click the button that activates the mouse pointer inspector (same can be done with ctrl + shift + c). the chrome devtools menu with the show mouse pointer button pressed and in blue If i hover the mouse over anything on the page it'll give me a load of really useful accessibiltity info as a separate popup (e.g. colour contrast, keyboard focusable etc) in a single place without me needing to go into the page source or run any other tools.

However the issue for me is i'm a low vision user and use a screen magnifier to see things on the screen - this means the magnification window usually tracks my mouse pointer and in this case, the popup appears off screen and when i move the mouse over to try to see it, it disappears as the element is no longer hovered over by the mouse. if i try clicking the element, the inspector seems to turn off and i jsut acitvate the button/link etc. i'm hovering over as normal. i'm not physically able to use the non-magnified screen where both mouse pointer and popup appear on the screen simultaneously.

My question is whether there is any way to make the popup persist even if the mouse moves, and i can close it with a button or the esc key? i've not been able to find anything so far in the settings that suggest you can, however feel like it would be annoying if a tool used for accessibiltity purposes isn't itself accessible! feel it should be in line with WCAG 1.4.13 Content on Hover or Focus (Level AA) - however it's obviously not a native aspect of the page but an overlay as part of the devtools suite https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/content-on-hover-or-focus.html

i could possibly open the snipping tool and set a delay on capturing the image to allow me to move the pointer, but this may 1. not provide enough time for me to find the place on screen given haivng the magnification on sometimes slows me down finding somewhere, 2. be really inconvenient and slow to have to do for each element on a page if i need to test more than 1 thing, and 3. it isn't guaranteed that the popup would remain active even after snipping tool captures the screen image (i tried it and as soon as snapshot took the popup vanished - i may be able to fiddle with some settings but it feels like i'm compensating for a poor design choice if i have to do this!)

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! If there's a tool that does the same things but is a bit more usable this could be an option but it'd be preferable to use chrome devtools as it's already autohirsed within my company and enabled for me

TomC
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  • Chrome does indeed fail WCAG 1.4.13 for exactly the user scenario you described. The snipping tool built in to Windows does allow you to snip a region after the popup appears, if you use the keyboard shortcut WinLogo+Shift+S **after** hovering over the element you want to inspect. I know that's not a great work around. All the info in the popup is available in the code inspector, but it's not conveniently "packaged" together. You have to view the color and contrast in the style inspector and the accessible name in the "Accessibility" tab. Kind of sucks. – slugolicious Apr 11 '23 at 15:54
  • @slugolicious appreciate the response, that is annoying but not much to be done about the devtools drawbacks. tried what you suggested and i'm getting the popup disappearing as soon as the screen snipping shortcuts are activated, and then it appears straight away after i've selected a bit of the screen. if i put a delay on either snipping tool or snip&sketch i can get it to work but still not optimal as i'm having to set tthe delay manually each time! – TomC Apr 12 '23 at 08:57
  • Hmm, that's not what I'm seeing. If I use Ctrl+Shift+C in Chrome to start the selection mode and move my mouse over an element, the tooltip displays. And then if I hit WinLogo+Shift+S while the tooltip is displayed, the Windows snipping tool goes into a "drag region to capture" mode and the tooltip continues to display so I can capture it. If yours does not do that, perhaps we have a difference in our snipping settings? Although I haven't changed my default settings. I'm not using the timing delay feature. – slugolicious Apr 12 '23 at 19:40

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