I'm building something that fixes this exact problem[1].
The landing page doesn't advertise it yet, but essentially, I give agents a small set of tools to explore apps' surfaces, and then an API over common macOS functions, especially those related to accessibility.
The agent explores the app, then writes a repeatable workflow for it. Then it can run that workflow through CLI: `invoke chrome pinTab`
Why accessibility? Well, turns out that it's just a good DOM in general. It's structure for apps. Not all apps implement it perfectly, but enough do to make it wildly useful.
[1] https://getinvoke.com - note that the landing page is targeted towards creatives right now and doesn't talk about this use case yet
Playwright, the end-to-end testing framework for the web, provides a strong incentive to give sites good a11y: Playwright tests are an absolute delight to read, write and maintain on properly accessible sites, when using the accessibility locators. Somewhat less so when using a soup of CSS selector and getByText()-style locators.
One thing I am curious about is a hybrid approach where LLMs work in conjunction with vision models (and probes which can query/manipulate the DOM) to generate Playwright code which wraps browser access to the site in a local, programmable API. Then you'd have agents use that API to access the site rather than going through the vision agents for everything.
I've mentioned several times and gotten snarky remarks about how rewriting your code so it fits in your head, and in the LLM's context helps the LLM code better, to which people complain about rewriting code just for an LLM, not realizing that the suggestion is to follow better coding principles to let the LLM code better, which has the net benefit of letting humans code better! Well looks like, if you support accessibility in your web apps correctly, Playwright MCP will work correctly for you.
Was looking for this comment. I'd like to see this approach in the comparison...having the LLM build a playwright script and use it. I suspect it would beat time-to-market for the api, and be close-ish in elapsed time per transaction.
Harder to scale if it's doing a lot of them, I suppose.
There is also Testing Library, which I’ve mostly seen and used for unit tests (vitest) and component tests (Storybook), that practically forces you into setting things up in an accessible way. The methods for finding elements are along the lines of “find by ARIA role” or “get by label” - in fact, querying the DOM with selectors is afaik either not a part of the library or very difficult to do because their focus is ensuring your app is actually accessible as part of your testing strategy.
I've found that by far the most useful websites as a programmer are also the ones most resistant to AI. This would be a huge loss for anyone vision impaired
What sorts of sites are you thinking of? To me, “most useful to a programmer” evokes docs and blogs and github issues and forum posts. I suppose some forums might be AI-resistant (login wall), but the others are trivially AI accessible.
That's less a value judgment, more a necessary evil due to the plethora of bad actors out there. I doubt it will get in the way of a local model used in a reasonable manner.
Most wikis you can mirror locally if you really need to hammer them.
And lets not forget that not all disabilities are chronic. Many disabilities are situational or temporary. AI is a great assist for a hangover day for example...
as someone who doesnt do web stuff, i found some humor in having no idea what "a11y" was, having to look it up, and finding out it is supposed to be "accessibility".
my quick accessibility tip: introduce what your acronyms, initialisms, and numeronyms stand for at least once.
a11y is pretty pervasive and well understood in the context around what is being discussed. I18n as well, you get to look that one up to because that makes you one of today's lucky 10000 https://xkcd.com/1053/
I mean…I guess. But this is ridiculous - how many layers does our technology need to bash through to update two records on remote systems? I get that value is being added at some point - but just charge some micropayment for transactions. This is just too much.
If you're on macOS and interested in this space, I highly recommend you open up the system-provided Accessibility Inspector.app and play around with apps and browsers. See how the green cells might guide an LLM to only need to read/OCR specific parts of a screen, how much text is already natively available to the accessibility engine, and how this could lead to really effective hybrid systems - not just MCPs, but code generators that can build and run their own scripts to crawl your accessibility hierarchy for your workflow!
I think this is very fertile ground - big labs need to use approaches that can work on multiple platforms and arbitrary workflows, and full-page vision is the lowest common denominator. Platform-specific approaches are a really exciting open space!
That's how I got into this thing in the first place, hah. Golden advice. It's incredibly cool to see what some apps offer. More of them have great accessibility support than you think (or at least than I thought!)
take a peek at https://github.com/willwade/app-automate?tab=readme-ov-file#... - its early and needs some work -but this is the idea behind this.. (my use case is not agents but actual real disabled people..who need tooling to provide better access to the desktop)
This is a good solution, instead of everyone blowing tokens on repeating the same computer use task, come up with a way to share the workflows. I think you'd need to make sure there aren't workflows shared that extract user information (passwords).
From applications that capture the screen or use accessibility APIs, perhaps, but what about, e.g., Windows applications that capture window messages, e.g.,
Obviously, if you can inject code into a process that receives sensitive data, you're already running in a context where all security bets are off.
But with processes you yourself create, you probably can, even without elevated privileges, unless the application takes measures to prevent injection (akin to game anticheat mechanisms), so it seems worth pointing out that there are simple mechanisms to subvert such "protected" fields that don't require application-specific reverse engineering.
Interesting! I started something - nowhere near as complete as that and quite different but again using accessibility UI elements. The BIG problem I've found is SOOOO much stuff does really poorly having these elements exposed. Here was my approach https://github.com/willwade/app-automate?tab=readme-ov-file#... - What I do here is build UI templates - either using UIAccess OR using a one pass using a vision model.
"my experience is the opposite actually. UIA looks uniform on paper but WPF, WinForms, and Win32 all expose different control patterns and you end up writing per-toolkit handlers anyway. Qt only exposes anything if QAccessible was compiled in and the accessibility plugin is loaded at runtime, which on shipped binaries is basically never. Electron is just as opaque on Windows as on macOS because it's the same chromium underneath drawing into a canvas. the real split isn't OS vs OS, it's native toolkit vs everything else."
sorry i had missed this! this is extremely interesting. thank you for sharing. i thought about this approach and came to the same conclusions as the reddit thread you shared. then again, it probably works fine for 80% of cases...
Isn't that basically what browser base does. I've found the hardest part of browser use to be stealth first then client change management then browser comprehension (which gets better with every new model).
i'm not too familiar with browserbase, but invoke works with any macOS app (or at least the accessible ones), i think browserbase is only for browser usage.
in the context of this blog post, the conclusion looks similar though!
"use the whole web like it's an API"
works much better than
"figure out similar or identical tasks from a clean slate every single time you do them"
The landing page doesn't advertise it yet, but essentially, I give agents a small set of tools to explore apps' surfaces, and then an API over common macOS functions, especially those related to accessibility.
The agent explores the app, then writes a repeatable workflow for it. Then it can run that workflow through CLI: `invoke chrome pinTab`
Why accessibility? Well, turns out that it's just a good DOM in general. It's structure for apps. Not all apps implement it perfectly, but enough do to make it wildly useful.
[1] https://getinvoke.com - note that the landing page is targeted towards creatives right now and doesn't talk about this use case yet