Building a general-purpose accessibility agent—and what we learned in the process

It is an understatement to say agents have become a popular way of working with code. GitHub has adopted agent-based code creation and editing for many of its initiatives, including piloting an agent to help with our commitment to accessibility.

GitHub is currently piloting an experimental general-purpose accessibility agent to achieve two main goals:

Providing engineers with reliable, just-in-time answers to accessibility questions in the GitHub Copilot CLI and the Copilot VS Code integration.

Catching and automatically remediating simple, objective accessibility issues before they go to production.

For purpose number two, the accessibility agent is set to automatically evaluate changes that modify our front-end code.