A Prototype VS Code Extension to Improve Web Accessible Development

Abstract: Achieving web accessibility is essential to building inclusive digital experiences. However, accessibility issues are often identified only after a website has been fully developed, making them difficult to address. This paper introduces a Visual Studio Code plugin that integrates calls to a LLM to assist developers in identifying and resolving accessibility issues within the IDE, reducing accessibility defects that might otherwise reach the production environment. Our evaluation shows promising results: the plugin effectively generates functioning fixes for accessibility issues when the errors are correctly detected. However, detecting errors using a generic prompt-designed for broad applicability across various code structures-remains challenging and limited in accuracy.