Comment by DrScientist
10 hours ago
Because, thinking bigger picture, having an AI assistant acting on your behalf might be more effective than slow navigation via accessibility features?
I get the wider point that if accessibility features were good enough at describing the functionality and intent then you wouldn't need a separate WebMCP.
So what does WebMCP do that accessibility doesn't?
Seems to me, at cursory reading, it's around providing a direct js interface to the web site ( as oppose to DOM forms ).
Kind of mixing an API and a human UI into one single page.
Navigation shouldn't be slow when using accessibility features though. The browser already prices the accessibility tree with full context and semantics of what is on the page and what can be interacted with.
I take the same issue when MCP servers are created for CLI tools. LLMs are very good at running Unix commands - make sure your tool has good `--help` docs and let the LLM figure it out just like a human would.
I guess I was asking - assuming that WebMCP isn't totally misguided - which of course is an assumption - is there anything that current accessibility standards can learn from WebMCP - ie why did they feel the need to create it?
I'm not aware of anything WebMCP could add that wouldn't be more useful as an improvement to accessibility tooling instead.
MCP is ultimately another solution to trying to make RPC(ish) situations more RESTful. I.e. they need self-documenting, discoverable APIs.
That's exactly what you can get from both HTML and the accessibility tree, though. We don't need another implementation for it. My guess (conjecture here) is that all the skills, MCP, WebMCP, etc talk is a manifestation of all the model providers and VCs backing them trying desperately to have others find ways to make LLMs worth the cost.