Accessibility Insights for Windows overview: an accessibility inspector for desktop apps
What the tool does
Accessibility Insights for Windows is a free, open source diagnostic application from Microsoft for testing the accessibility of Windows programs. It attaches to a running window, walks the UI Automation tree, and reports what assistive technology would actually receive: names, roles, states, keyboard focus order, bounding rectangles and the patterns each control supports. A FastPass mode runs a set of automated checks and produces a short list of failures with severity and a link to the corresponding rule, while a live inspect mode follows the mouse so you can point at any element and read its properties immediately. Colour contrast measurement, tab stop capture and event recording round out the picture. The project is published under the MIT licence.
How a typical review works
The workflow starts by launching the target application, then attaching the tool to its window. A screenshot of the window appears with the element tree beside it, and clicking an element in either view selects it in the other. FastPass runs the automated rules and highlights failures directly on the screenshot, which makes it easy to show a developer exactly which control is wrong. For deeper work, the properties pane lists every attribute of the selected element, and the events view records the notifications an application raises while you interact with it, which is how missing or duplicated announcements are caught. A results file can be saved so that a review becomes evidence rather than an opinion, and a bug-filing integration can turn a failure into a work item.
Practical settings, limits and scope
The tool inspects what an application exposes through UI Automation, so a control that is painted rather than implemented as a real control will appear as a single opaque element, which is itself the finding. Automated checks only cover the mechanical subset of accessibility: they cannot judge whether alternative text is meaningful, whether instructions make sense, or whether a flow is usable with a screen reader, so a manual pass with actual assistive technology remains necessary. Only Windows desktop applications are in scope; web pages are covered by a separate sibling tool. Some applications run elevated, and inspecting them requires the inspector to run elevated too. The installer is a Windows MSI, and the project expects a reasonably current Windows release.
When to choose something else
If you are testing a website, the browser-based sibling tool from the same family fits better because it understands the document object model. If you need to automate accessibility checks across a build pipeline rather than inspect interactively, a command line scanner is the right shape. If your platform is macOS or Linux, this application will not run at all, and platform-specific inspectors should be used instead. And if the aim is simply to use a screen reader rather than to test one, this is a development instrument and not assistive technology itself.
- Best for
- Windows developers, QA engineers and accessibility specialists who need evidence about how an application exposes itself to assistive technology.
- Good to know
- Automated checks cover only mechanical rules, so meaningful manual testing with a screen reader is still required, and elevated applications must be inspected from an elevated instance.
How to get started
- Download the MSI installer from the official release page and run it.
- Start the application you want to test, then launch Accessibility Insights for Windows.
- Attach the inspector to the target window and use live inspect to point at the controls you care about.
- Run FastPass to get the automated failures, then click each one to see the element and the rule it breaks.
- Record events and check tab stops manually, then save the results file as evidence for the bug report or work item.
Questions & answers
Does it test websites?
No. This build inspects Windows desktop applications, and web pages are handled by the browser-based sibling tool from the same project family.
Can it replace manual screen reader testing?
No. It automates the mechanical checks, but whether names are meaningful and flows are usable still needs a person with real assistive technology.
What if the target application runs as administrator?
The inspector must also run elevated, otherwise it cannot see the window and its element tree.
