Lakshmi Showed Up, and So Did the Pull Requests

July 11, 2026

What happened when I gave my keyboard-testing agent a second persona and asked strangers to break it.

Three days ago I wrote about (opens in new tab) building keyboard-a11y-tester (opens in new tab), a pilot that tests web pages the way a keyboard-only user does instead of running a checklist. I closed that piece with a guess: the harder half of the idea, a screen-reader persona, was still ahead of me. I also asked people to point the tool at something, break it, and tell me where I'd drawn the line wrong.

Both happened faster than I expected.

What Lakshmi actually does

The screen-reader persona is named Lakshmi (opens in new tab), after the W3C user story she's built from. She doesn't drive a real screen reader. The tool builds a spec-compliant ARIA/ACCNAME accessible tree over the live page in the browser's own JS engine, using @guidepup/virtual-screen-reader (opens in new tab), and computes what a conformant screen reader would announce. No NVDA, no JAWS, no VoiceOver ever launches. Her virtual cursor tracks real keyboard focus automatically, so the same Tab and Enter keystrokes that drive the keyboard persona also drive her announcements, with nothing separate to keep in sync.

Lakshmi doesn't claim to be a disabled person, same as the keyboard persona never did. She's an emulation of what a screen reader should announce given a page's ARIA and HTML, not a stand-in for a real screen-reader user's judgment.

What came back

The project also picked up an OpenSSF Best Practices badge (opens in new tab) and a Scorecard badge (opens in new tab) this week. Three days into a solo pilot, that's an odd thing to prioritize, unless you take "trust the evidence" seriously enough to apply it to your own supply chain too.

A few pull requests came in from people I've never met, which I didn't expect this soon and am genuinely glad for. I don't know yet if that continues, but it's the first real answer to the question I actually asked in the last piece: would anyone with real expertise bother arguing with this.

If you test with a screen reader for a living, point Lakshmi at something, break it, and tell me where I got it wrong.