Glossary

Accessibility tree

The parallel tree of nodes the user agent maintains alongside the DOM, exposing each element's name, role, state, value, and relationships to platform accessibility APIs and assistive technology.

The accessibility tree is the bridge between the DOM and assistive technology. Each engine builds and updates it in parallel with the DOM: a <button> becomes a node with role “button”, a name computed from its text content, and a focused/disabled/pressed state synchronised with the DOM. Authors do not interact with the tree directly; they shape it through HTML elements, ARIA attributes, and ElementInternals on custom elements. DevTools in Chromium, WebKit, and Gecko exposes the tree for inspection.