programmatic api for extension

[zzo]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I would like to kick off an accessibility run programmatically from within my webpage. I am creating a web UI that wants to programmatically launch MS AI against a given URL (see https://developer.chrome.com/apps/messaging#external-webpage)

Describe the desired outcome

Ideally would like to postMessage to the extension with a URL and an opaque token and whether to run FastPass or Manual accessibility checks. AI will then run either and when the user clicks 'Export Report' the report will be postMessage'd back to my UI (ideally this report would be in JSON not HTML but don't want to confuse/add any extra work initially!)

Describe alternatives you've considered

I can drive the extension using puppeteer but that requires users to download local code (to spawn the browser with the URL and MS AI pointing back to it).
I can also create another extension to drive the process but that's clunky plus requires Chrome to be started with additional, non-standard command line arguments (--silent-debugger-extension-api and --extensions-on-chrome-urls)
The cleanest solution is to update MS AI itself to have an API that can be driven by any page.

Additional context

THANKS - I can look into creating a PR for this if this is something you'd accept

[dbjorge]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for writing up this request! Typically, we recommend that folks looking to automatically/programatically run accessibility scans use axe-core (the accessibility scanning engine Accessibility Insights uses under the hood for all of its automated checks) directly, which already provides JSON-formatted scan results and has many integration libraries to help you run it from a variety of different languages and test frameworks, and we have published samples of how to integrate it in Azure Pipelines CI builds.

Does axe-core sound like what you're looking for? If not, can you help us understand more about your motivation for wanting to automate at the Accessibility Insights level specifically, rather than at the scanning engine level?

[msft-github-bot]

The team requires additional author feedback; please review their replies and update this issue accordingly. Thank you for contributing to Accessibility Insights!

[zzo]

thanks for the response! We already do use axe-core to run automated browser testing - I'm interested in incorporating your manual tests into our a11y testing workflow tool - that's where things are much more interesting.
From our browser-based a11y testing toolkit/dashboard we'd like to launch MS AI in 'manual testing mode' against a given URL and when the tester is done doing all of the relevant manual tests, then suck the results back into our tool to show alongside of the axe results providing a dashboard of release readiness ( from an a11y point of view).
So we already collect axe results against their configured set of URLs and would like to incorporate manual testing (powered by AI) into our suite.
What do you think?? thanks!!! Mark

[msft-github-bot]

This issue has been marked as ready for team triage; we will triage it in our weekly review and update the issue. Thank you for contributing to Accessibility Insights!

[ferBonnin]

Hi @zzo thanks your interest in the tool and the feature request!
We have received a similar ask #653 and we will add both to our needs investigation backlog. We will update here when we know more and we will keep checking for upvotes/reactions from the community on this request

[msft-github-bot]

This issue requires additional investigation by the Accessibility Insights team. When the issue is ready to be triaged again, we will update the issue with the investigation result and add "status: ready for triage". Thank you for contributing to Accessibility Insights!

[adbajaj]

This would be very helpful for my team as well! Would be interested to know ball park timings on when this is coming.
Thanks,
Aditya

[mohanraj-r]

I use axe-core and have been thinking about something similar as well!

[ferBonnin]

based on conversation when revisiting this feature request, we have created a way to export an Assessment report as JSON and at this moment we believe the implications of creating an API are out of the scope for the project

[ghost]

This issue has been marked as being beyond the support scope of Accessibility Insights. It will now be closed automatically for house-keeping purposes.