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. To date, the agent has reviewed 3,535 pull requests, with a 68% resolution rate . In order of occurrence, the top five issue types center around: Making structure and relationships clear to assistive technologies Providing clear and concise names for interactive controls Ensuring users are aware of important announcements Ensuring there are text alternatives for non-text content Moving keyboard focus through pages and views in a logical order Each of these issue types represents friction and barriers automatically removed that would have otherwise inhibited use of GitHub for people who use and rely on assistive technology. Here’s a screenshot of it in action: Interested? We’ll be outlining successes and lessons learned with this experiment, with the hopes that it can help with other teams’ accessibility journeys. What are LLMs and agents? Note : This post assumes at least some understanding of LLMs, agents, and their related concepts. If you’re not familiar, you can learn more about LLMs on our blog . Some specific posts you may find helpful are: A guide to deciding what AI model to use in GitHub Copilot GitHub for Beginners: How to get LLMs to do what you want How to write a great agents.md: Lessons from over 2,500 repositories Multi-agent workflows