The Accessibility Tree Is Your Newest Public API
For a decade, accessibility was the work that slipped. It lived at the bottom of the backlog, resurfaced during compliance audits, and got patched with just enough ARIA to quiet the linter. The economic argument never landed because the affected users were a minority whose churn never showed up in a dashboard anyone was paged about.
Then browser agents arrived, and the economics inverted overnight. Products like ChatGPT's browsing mode, Claude's computer use, and the wave of Playwright-MCP-based automation don't see your pixels. They read the browser's accessibility tree — the same semantic structure screen readers have consumed for twenty years. Every unlabeled button, every div masquerading as a link, every custom dropdown that doesn't expose its state is now invisible not just to blind users but to the agents your business partners are integrating against. A decade of deferred accessibility debt just became integration debt, and integration debt has paying customers attached.
