MCPs are, in part, a response to the difficulties LLM companies had when trying out LLMs interact online by visually navigation the screen.
They need APIs for it to be efficient. For whatever reason they didn't choose to use accessibility tooling to automate agents, and we haven't written REST APIs for 20+ years - they're left hoping a newly designed protocol will fix it.
I was genuinely (maybe naively) impressed when google pushed for https everywhere. Maybe there were nefarious reason behind it that I missed, but it did a lot of good for the average web user.
LLM companies could easily have made a similar impact by leaning on accessibility tooling. Pushing companies to better support ARIA standards online would have made a huge impact for the better.
Heck, throw a little of that LLM money towards browser vendors to even better support ARIA - personally I'd love to see a proper API for directly accessing the accessibility tree.
> LLM companies could easily have made a similar impact by leaning on accessibility tooling. Pushing companies to better support ARIA standards online would have made a huge impact for the better.
If anything, they'd have the reverse impact, unfortunately. The thing is, the companies whose sites/apps/resources would be accessed by LLMs don't want this. That's the entire point of the article we're discussing.
All I'm saying is, accessibility is the only interoperability wedge they can't just close off, without a huge community backlash and in some cases because of compliance reasons.
Yeah that's totally fair, I diverted a bit and was only thinking about companies I actually see wanting to support external LLMs with APIs.
Expedia makes sense, for example, and it'd be nice if they had more of a reason to improve accessibility on their site rather than building out and maintaining an API service specifically for MCP.
> For whatever reason they didn't choose to use accessibility tooling to automate agents
That surprises me too. It's arguably the only way forward that has a chance of surviving for more than a moment, because accessibility actually has a strong cultural and (occasionally) legal backing, so companies can't easily close that off.