What a Screen Reader Actually 'Sees' on a Page
A sighted user perceives a page's layout, colors, and visual hierarchy at a glance. A screen reader doesn't process any of that visual information directly — it consumes a different, structured representation of the page instead.
What is this representation called?
The correct answer is "The accessibility tree."
A screen reader consumes the accessibility tree — a structured representation built from the page's semantic HTML and ARIA attributes, describing each element's role, name, and state. Visual layout — where something sits on screen, its color, its size, its z-index — isn't part of this tree at all; it's simply invisible to that layer of the stack.
The DOM tree is the underlying document structure the browser parses, but it's not the role/name/state representation assistive tech specifically consumes. The CSS object model describes styling, which the accessibility tree ignores. The render tree is a rendering-engine concept for painting pixels, not an assistive-technology interface.
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