Use Visual Accessors for Web Testing

Last reviewed: October 2, 2026

Use this article when web tests need visual matching because a stable DOM locator, accessibility locator, or text locator is not available.

What ischanged in this article

• Clarified visual accessors as a Visualtargeted Accessor?fallback

  Visualfor Accessorsweb aretesting rather than the default locator strategy.

• Updated guidance around image basedboundaries, accessorsvisual whichmatching, canUI bedrift, usedand tomaintenance enhance your test scriptsreview in situations where traditional code-based accessors will fail.current AIQ willterminology.
• Added capturechecks anfor viewport size, browser scaling, theme changes, crop quality, waits, and false-positive matches.

Validation workflow

1. Try stable DOM, accessibility, text, or attribute-based locators before adding a visual accessor.
2. Capture a tightly scoped image of the websiteelement or region and thenavoid cropbroad the surrounding boundaries of the elementscreenshots that youcan arematch workingunrelated on. During playback it takes the image and applies a feature based matching algorithm which creates a pattern from the image and uses that to locate the imageUI.
3. Replay on the webpage.target browser and viewport and review results after UI or theme changes.

UsingReview anote: VisualThis Accessorspage meansnow thataligns AIQweb isvisual notaccessor onlyguidance looking at justwith the code elements in a page, the AI is also looking at themobile visual elementsaccessor oncleanup thealready page.completed.

Visual Accessors vs Visual Hints

Visual hints are images in test scripts that generally take the place of comments. They are not actual accessors. Only AIQ uses true Visual Accessors.

For example, AIQ can now locate a button and automatically understand the boundaries of the button, its location on the page as well as the visual element of the button to identify it going forward. This means that if in the future, the code-based accessors have changed, or are no longer present, the Visual Accessor used for the button will allow the test to run without failing because of the failure of the other accessors.

Visual Accessors in AIQ

The ability to use visual accessors has been added to the Web Testing IDE in AIQ 4.10.0. This functionality means that AIQ can now automatically collect images and used them as valid accessors.

These visual accessors allow you to capture images into your test scripts. Images will be linked to the script so that the script is aware of any images.

Previously, accessors for images was limited to the XY coordinates. That means that your scripts run the risk of being somewhat brittle if an image moved a little bit to the left or to the right. Visual accessors make your scripts more resilient and require less maintenance.

Visual accessors are similar to smart tags-based images, the result is a boundary that indicates where the image is located and not a specific HTML tag.

Visual accessors for web testing compliments the visual accessors for mobile testing functionality that was introduced in AIQ 4.9. See Visual Accessors for Mobile Testing for more information.