Accessibility is a kind of important design feature of products, and accessibility analysis has been acknowledged as a powerful tool for solving computational manufacturing problems arising from different manufacturing processes. After exploring the relations among approachability, accessibility and visibility, a general method for accessibility analysis using visibility cones (VC) is proposed. With the definition of VC of a point, three kinds of visibility of a feature, namely complete visibility cone (CVC), partial visibility cone (PVC) and local visibility cone (LVC), are defined. A novel approach to computing VCs is formulated by identifying C-obstacles in the C-space, for which a general and efficient algorithm is proposed and implemented by making use of visibility culling. Lastly, we discuss briefly how to realize accessibility analysis in numerically controlled (NC) machining planning, coordinate measuring machines (CMMs) inspection planning and assembly sequence planning with the proposed method Accessibility is a kind of important design feature of products, and accessibility analysis has been acknowledged as a powerful tool for solving computational manufacturing problems arising from different manufacturing processes. After exploring the relations among approachability, accessibility and visibility, a general method for accessibility analysis using With the definition of VC of a point, three kinds of visibility of a feature, namely CVC, partial visibility cone (PVC) and local visibility cone (LVC), are defined. A novel approach to computing VCs is formulated by identifying C-obstacles in the C-space, for which a general and efficient algorithm is proposed and implemented by making use of of visibility culling. Lastly, we discuss briefly how to enable accessibility analysis in numerically controlled (NC) machining planning, coordinate measuring machines (CMMs) inspection planning and assembly sequence planning with the proposed method