custom accessibility inspector

[phillco]

MacOS includes an app called the Accessibility Inspector, which we frequently use during development:

The most useful feature is that you can click the "crosshair" button and then hover over a certain element in a different app to see its attributes.

While the inspector is nice, it has a few weaknesses:

• Limited voice control -- it has a couple of keyboard shortcuts but that's it
• Squats on the alt-space shortcut while running (makes it harder to quickly use).
• Similarly, if an element is selected it draws a persistent green box around it. Normally this is fine but it makes for observing things long term annoying
• After using the inspector, you frequently will want to iterate on what you've just inspected using the Talon REPL, but this requires context switch + manually copying information. A first party Talon integration could allow for faster switching.

Thanks to the new ui.element_at() recently added to talon by aegis, we could build a replacement using Canvas. It could serve as a semitransparent sidebar that could be dragged anywhere and toggled on/off as necessary. It could also draw borders around the focused element and/or elements under the mouse.

[nriley]

#68 implements a simple version of this by outputting information to the log. Still plenty of room for improvement!