Accessibility Inspector on the Mac
In Mac OS 10.4 and later, Accessibility Inspector is available to test the accessibility information provided by the NSAccessibility API. When the Developer Tools (XCode) are installed Accessibility Inspector can be found in /Developer/Applications/Utilities/Accessibility Tools.
The Developer Tools can be downloaded from the Apple Developer Connection website: connect.apple.com. (A free Apple account is required.) The website says XCode is also on the OS media, however you can guarantee yourself the up-to-date version by checking the website.
Note: the fine print says “To use Accessibility Inspector, be sure to enable assistive applications in the Universal Access Preferences.”
After I downloaded and installed XCode, using the default settings for the install, Accessibility Inspector and Accessibility Verifier were in the location /Developer/Applications/Utilities/Accessibility Tools. This location can be reached using Finder.
If you are using VoiceOver as I do, you may be tricked by Accessibility Inspector in that it may seem like it has not loaded. It is put into what VoiceOver calls a “system window” and it does not gain usable focus. I found that it is necessary to use VoiceOver’s Application List to move focus to it. (VO+F1, F1. Recall VO stands for CTRL+Option in Apple/VoiceOver speak.)
My preliminary examination of Accessibility Inspector indicates that it only tracks the object that the mouse points at. Therefore you need to find the object you’re interested in with the mouse, which seems very tedious and not as nice as Inspector on Windows’s ability to track keyboard focus and the cursor.
If you can get Accessibility Inspector’s focus to the object you’re interested in, be sure to lock it there with Command+F7 before switching to its window.