[Feature Request] Allow scans to start at an element other than the root element

[microsoft]

[Feature Request] Allow scans to start at an element other than the root element

[msftbot]

This issue has been marked as ready for team triage; we will triage it in our weekly review and update the issue. Thank you for contributing to Accessibility Insights!

[adarshrema]

Hello @decriptor, thank you for your interest in axe-windows and this feature request. This is a tricky problem and there is no single solution that would work in all usage scenarios. The challenge here is finding a way that allows you to specify the root element for scanning within some sort of test environment, and that will depend directly upon the information that your test system can access. If you can elaborate on what information is available within your test system, we will perhaps have a better chance of creating something that you can use effectively.

[msftbot]

The team requires additional author feedback; please review their replies and update this issue accordingly. Thank you for contributing to Accessibility Insights!

[msftbot]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it is marked as requiring author feedback but has not had any activity for 4 days. It will be closed if no further activity occurs within 3 days of this comment. Thank you for contributing to Accessibility Insights!

[decriptor]

@adarshrema Sorry for the delay in responding. We are testing a part of our UI within our Visual Studio extension. In this case I'm interested in anything within a particular pane. What I've done so far is to find the name of that pane and grab any errors that have that pane "Name" as a parent element in the hierarchy. Here is what I have currently:

The pane Name is "activity_main.xml".
Here is the code I've stubbed out:

errors: All of the errors that axe found.
targetParentElementName: find all of the errors that have this element as it's parent at some point in the tree.

IEnumerable<ScanResult> FindApplicableErrors (IEnumerable<ScanResult> errors, string targetParentElementName)
{
	var selectedErrors = new List<ScanResult> ();

	foreach (var error in errors) {
		if (HasTargetParent (error.Element, targetParentElementName))
			selectedErrors.Add (error);
	}

	return selectedErrors;
}

bool HasTargetParent (ElementInfo element, string parentElement)
{
	if (element.Properties.TryGetValue ("Name", out var propertyName)) {
		if (propertyName == parentElement)
			return true;
	}

	if (element.Parent == null)
		return false;

	return HasTargetParent (element.Parent, parentElement);
}

Result: