[tomjakubowski]

Playwright, the end-to-end testing framework for the web, provides a strong incentive to give sites good a11y: Playwright tests are an absolute delight to read, write and maintain on properly accessible sites, when using the accessibility locators. Somewhat less so when using a soup of CSS selector and getByText()-style locators.

One thing I am curious about is a hybrid approach where LLMs work in conjunction with vision models (and probes which can query/manipulate the DOM) to generate Playwright code which wraps browser access to the site in a local, programmable API. Then you'd have agents use that API to access the site rather than going through the vision agents for everything.

[giancarlostoro]

This is precisely how the Playwright MCP works, which lets something like Claude directly test a website.

https://playwright.dev/docs/getting-started-mcp#accessibilit...

I've mentioned several times and gotten snarky remarks about how rewriting your code so it fits in your head, and in the LLM's context helps the LLM code better, to which people complain about rewriting code just for an LLM, not realizing that the suggestion is to follow better coding principles to let the LLM code better, which has the net benefit of letting humans code better! Well looks like, if you support accessibility in your web apps correctly, Playwright MCP will work correctly for you.

Amazing.

[tyingq]

Was looking for this comment. I'd like to see this approach in the comparison...having the LLM build a playwright script and use it. I suspect it would beat time-to-market for the api, and be close-ish in elapsed time per transaction.

Harder to scale if it's doing a lot of them, I suppose.

[lsaferite]

Using playwright-cli with Claude code is highly effective for debugging locally deployed web apps with essentially zero setup.

[phatskat]

There is also Testing Library, which I’ve mostly seen and used for unit tests (vitest) and component tests (Storybook), that practically forces you into setting things up in an accessible way. The methods for finding elements are along the lines of “find by ARIA role” or “get by label” - in fact, querying the DOM with selectors is afaik either not a part of the library or very difficult to do because their focus is ensuring your app is actually accessible as part of your testing strategy.