InterA11y: Interactive Web Accessibility Error Detection with LLM Agents

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown potential to expand the coverage of web accessibility evaluation. However, current LLM-based checkers neglect much of the interactive and dynamic web contexts, resulting in limited coverage, high false discovery rates, and inconsistent performance across models. We present InterA11y, an agentic accessibility evaluation system that combines rubrics and interactive tools to support LLM agents in evaluating accessibility effectively. The rubrics decompose WCAG success criteria (SC) into testable aspects and guide agents in collecting and interpreting evidence. The interactive tools inspect or operate a webpage deterministically to collect evidence, such as focus appearances and error messages. We developed these rubrics and tools on 682 curated test cases grounded in established accessibility guidelines that target 10 commonly violated SC. We evaluated InterA11y on 197 expert-annotated cases sampled from 54 real webpages. Results show InterA11y achieves higher recall than the strongest evaluated LLM-driven baseline (79.0% vs. 44.4%), while maintaining comparable precision to best rule-based checkers (93.1% vs. 90.3-97.6%), with little variability between models. Further, when equipped with our interactive tools, general-purpose web agents detect more accessibility errors with fewer false positives and less token usage than without these tools.