Accessibility APIs, built for humans with disabilities, are a cheap and underutilized control surface for AI agents navigating your app. If you populate them correctly, your agents stop burning tokens on screenshot analysis and pixel-level inference.
The argument is straightforward: accessibility trees expose structured, semantic UI state that agents can read directly. No vision model needed. No bounding box math. The cost difference between parsing an accessibility tree and running a multimodal inference call is not trivial at scale.
The piece is worth reading for the implementation angle, specifically what it means to 'populate' your accessibility layer in a way that agents can actually use. Most developers ship accessibility metadata for compliance reasons and leave it half-empty. That gap is the opportunity.
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