Accessibility (a11y) Lighthouse errors in Workspace Add-ons due to host iframe/document

Google Workspace Developers Q&A
1

Hi everyone,

We are currently developing a Google Workspace Add-on and are running accessibility audits using Lighthouse. We are encountering some issues that seem to be outside of our control, and we’re looking for guidance or to see if this is a known issue on Google’s end.

This is a critical issue for us, as several of our clients have strict compliance requirements and demand that our add-on be fully accessible.

Lighthouse is flagging foundational accessibility errors on our add-on, specifically:

  • Missing lang attribute in the <html> tag.

  • Missing <title> tag.

  • Missing <main> landmark.

After investigating the generated HTML, we’ve verified that our injected code (inside the add-on’s scope) is fully compliant and includes all the necessary a11y improvements. However, Google Workspace wraps our add-on in an auto-generated iframe / host document. Lighthouse evaluates this outermost document, which lacks these structural tags, causing the audit to fail.

Since we don’t have control over the host document generated by Google Workspace, we cannot natively fix these top-level DOM issues. We want to avoid using hacky DOM-manipulation workarounds to alter the parent frame.

Has anyone else encountered this? Is there an official recommendation to handle Lighthouse audits for Workspace Add-ons without false positives, or is this an area the Workspace engineering team plans to patch in the host wrapper?

Thanks in advance for any insights!

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