Comment by _heimdall
7 months ago
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.
Isn't Aria there to describe the structure of the page so that say visually impaired users gain the same information as any other user? ie the interpretation of what that page then does, and so the appropriate action to take is largely left to the human user post description - just as web you load a page and look at it - the human brain works out what to do based on those visual and textual clues.
This leaves agents trying to work out page intent, allowed values for text fields - parsing returned pages for working out success or failure etc.
I'm assuming that's why they want what is effectively an in page API - that massively improves machine accessibility and can piggy back on browser authentication systems so the agent can operate on the users behalf.
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