You ran the scan. The tool flagged something. A violation, a failure, a red mark in the results table. And then comes the part nobody talks about. The ten minutes you spend staring at the DOM trying to figure out which part of a 47-attribute element is actually the problem.
That's the gap. And it's where accessibility audits quietly start falling apart.
The Dirty Middle Part of Accessibility Testing
Here's how it usually goes: You fire up an accessibility testing tool, scan your page and get back a list of violations.
Cool. But what exactly failed?
There are different problems with different fixes. Treating them as the same issue is how you end up with developers making five changes to figure out which one actually worked.
The violation is the what. The attribute is the where. And most tools stop at the what.
What the Key Code Attribute Feature Actually Does?
A11yInspect has a feature called Key Code Attribute and once you understand what it's solving, it's one of those "why doesn't every tool do this" moments.
When A11yInspect detects an accessibility violation, it doesn't just tell you the rule that failed. It surfaces the specific HTML attribute or ARIA property that's the actual source of the problem, right there in the results table, in the attribute column, next to the issue instance.
No DOM spelunking. No cross-referencing element properties. The attribute is already isolated for you.
Why This Is Genuinely Useful (Not Just a Nice-to-Have)?
Think about what normally happens after a scan.
You export the report. It says something like "ARIA violation - WCAG 4.1.2 - element X." You paste that into a ticket. Developer picks it up, opens DevTools, stares at the element and then pings you: "Which attribute exactly? There are like six ARIA properties on this thing."
You go back, re-run the scan, try to reproduce the finding, attempt to match the element to the violation in the report, and eventually piece it together. Two people. Multiple context switches. All for something that should've been in the report to begin with.
That round-trip is what Key Code Attribute eliminates.
It also quietly helps in a situation people don't talk about much - Auditing something you didn't build. When you're brought in to review a codebase you've never seen, attribute-level specificity is the difference between confidently pointing to what needs fixing and hedging with "it's somewhere around this component."
The team at BarrierBreak put together a solid breakdown of exactly this - worth a read if you're doing a lot of third-party or inherited codebase audits.
The Boring Thing Nobody Says About Accessibility Tooling
The quality of an accessibility tool isn't really measured by how many checks it runs. It's measured by how much time it saves between "I know there's a problem" and "I know exactly what to fix."
Most tools are good at the first part. Fewer are good at the second.
The Key Code Attribute feature doesn't sound glamorous. It's a column in a results table. But when you're mid-audit on a complex application with a mix of ARIA patterns, custom components and dynamically rendered markup, that column is doing a lot of quiet heavy lifting.
Give it a try. The free plan includes it. You might be surprised how much faster the "okay, now I actually fix it" part goes.
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