Accessibility is the first-class interface for AI agents
When I started evaluating browser agents, most of the conversation around me focused on multimodal models, computer-use systems and screenshot-based automation. Almost every framework I evaluated assumed agents needed to perceive the web the way humans do, visually, pixel by pixel. The more time I spent shipping agents against real web applications, the more I became convinced we were solving the wrong problem. AI agents would stall on checkout forms because a button had no ARIA role. They would waste seconds and thousands of tokens taking screenshots to figure out what was on the screen. The problem was never the Agent. It was that we kept treating the web as a visual surface, even though it already has a machine-readable interface. We have had one for decades. It is called the accessibility tree. The web already has a machine interface Most developers think of accessibility as a feature for people. Technically, accessibility required the web platform to solve a deeper problem: Exposi