@access

The @access tag documents the visibility of the element it decorates. It dates from a time before PHP allowed public, protected, and private modifiers on every kind of class member, when a docblock was the only place some elements' visibility could be recorded at all. Native modifiers have made it largely redundant for ordinary methods and properties, but it still turns up to describe a magic member or to override how visible an element appears in generated documentation.

"@access"
    ( "public" | "protected" | "private" )
    [ <Description> ]

Parsing an @access tag produces an AccessTag instance exposing $access, one of the Visibility::Public, Visibility::Protected, or Visibility::Private enum cases matching the keyword that was written.

enum Visibility: string
{
    case Public = 'public';
    case Protected = 'protected';
    case Private = 'private';
}

final class AccessTag extends Tag
{
    public function __construct(
        string $name,
        public readonly Visibility $access,
        ?DescriptionInterface $description = null,
    ) {
        parent::__construct($name, $description);
    }
}

@access is part of the original phpDocumentor tag vocabulary, but phpDocumentor 3 has since dropped it entirely: it is absent from the current tag reference index, and no tags/access.html page exists any longer. Only the archived phpDocumentor 1.x manual still describes it, as a legacy reference rather than current documentation — phpDocumentor 1.x manual, archived. It is supported here purely for reading older, classic-style docblocks.

05 July 2026