AI test: Can AI detect a div pretending to be a button?

Can AI detect a div pretending to be a button?

A <div> with an onclick. Looks like a button. Does something when you click it. But press Tab and nothing happens. Enter? Nothing either.

For a keyboard user, this button doesn’t exist.

This is the number 1 keyboard issue I encounter in audits (WCAG 2.1.1). And the easiest to fix: replace the div with a <button>. But can AI find this problem too? And not just in a code snippet, but on a real, live website?

Test 1: Code analysis

I gave Claude the following HTML, without hints:

<div class="btn-primary" onclick="addToCart(123)">Add to cart</div>

My prompt: “What accessibility issues do you see in this code?”

Result

Claude recognized it immediately:

“A <div> with an onclick handler is not keyboard accessible by default. It cannot be reached with Tab, it has no button role, and pressing Enter or Space will not activate it.”

It links the problem to WCAG 2.1.1 (Keyboard) and gives the correct solution: use a <button>.

But I gave AI a piece of code. That’s the easy version. Can AI also find this when you only have a URL?

Test 2: Testing a live website

Can AI visit a web page and detect this issue? Yes, but not by itself. AI needs a browser.

With Playwright (a browser automation tool), Claude Code can open a real browser, visit a web page, and inspect the DOM. That looks like this:

const { chromium } = require('playwright');

const browser = await chromium.launch({ headless: true });
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://example-webshop.com');

// Find all elements with onclick that aren't buttons or links
const problems = await page.evaluate(() => {
  const elements = document.querySelectorAll('[onclick]');
  return Array.from(elements)
    .filter(el => {
      const tag = el.tagName.toLowerCase();
      return tag !== 'button' && tag !== 'a' && tag !== 'input'
             && el.getAttribute('role') !== 'button';
    })
    .map(el => ({
      tag: el.tagName.toLowerCase(),
      text: el.textContent?.trim().substring(0, 80),
      onclick: el.getAttribute('onclick')
    }));
});

This script finds every div, span, or other non-interactive element with an onclick attribute. No source code needed. It tests the live page.

What can Playwright test?

Playwright runs a real Chromium browser. All JavaScript is executed, so you see the rendered DOM, not the source code. You can click, wait for a modal to appear, and then inspect the new HTML. Modals, accordions, tabs, lazy-loaded content, open Shadow DOM, iframes. It all works.

Where does it go wrong?

The biggest problem: addEventListener. Most modern websites don’t use onclick="..." in the HTML. They attach click events via JavaScript:

element.addEventListener('click', function() {
  addToCart(123);
});

This is invisible in the DOM. There’s no onclick attribute to search for.

You can look for signals that an element is meant to be clickable:

• Does it have cursor: pointer in the computed style?
• Does it have a class like “btn”, “button”, “clickable”?
• Is it a <div> or <span> with tabindex="0" but without role="button"?

But those are educated guesses. You’ll get false positives (elements that look clickable but aren’t) and false negatives (clickable elements without visual hints).

Other limitations:

What do you need?

To run this test yourself, you need three things:

1. Node.js (version 18 or higher)
2. Playwright (npm install playwright)
3. A Chromium browser (npx playwright install chromium)

No source code needed, no special access. You test the website as a visitor sees it.

The scorecard

AI finds this problem in code and with inline onclick. But with addEventListener (the way most modern websites work), it depends on heuristics. That’s a serious limitation.

The fix

<!-- Don't do this -->
<div class="btn-primary" onclick="addToCart(123)">Add to cart</div>

<!-- Do this -->
<button class="btn-primary" type="button" onclick="addToCart(123)">
  Add to cart
</button>

A <button> is focusable by default, activatable with Enter and Space, and has the correct role for screen readers. Free. No extra code needed.