UI automation is necessary for accessibility [LWN.net]

UI automation is necessary for accessibility

Posted Jul 11, 2026 20:07 UTC (Sat) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331)
In reply to: UI automation is necessary for accessibility by nhippi
Parent article: An update on the scraper situation

It's a quirk of human psychology that there's this huge behavioral discontinuity as a price reaches zero. People hate the anxiety that micropayment schemes produce. There's a reason "nickel and diming you" is common idiom. If there are to be micropayments, they're going to be limited, practically speaking, to autonomous systems.

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UI automation is necessary for accessibility

Posted Jul 11, 2026 21:23 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

There was a project that seemed almost perfect for that: Scroll.

You paid for a subscription ($7 a month, AFAIR) and then the participating sites got a proportional share of it (with some adjustments). And in exchange, you gained an ad-free browsing experience.

I totally loved it. Unfortunately, it got gobbled up by Twitter and promptly killed.

UI automation is necessary for accessibility

Posted Jul 11, 2026 22:55 UTC (Sat) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link]

Google Contributor was also very good. Similar model. I loved it, along with the three other people who tried it.

UI automation is necessary for accessibility

Posted Jul 13, 2026 23:37 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (4 responses)

> It's a quirk of human psychology that there's this huge behavioral discontinuity as a price reaches zero. People hate the anxiety that micropayment schemes produce.

Exactly why mobile phone operators have invented their "unlimited" plans with... various GB maximum/month. It's a genius psychology trick that removes that "How many bytes to open this page?" anxiety. It's genius because it's as simple as saying the opposite of the truth - and it works!

That same "Alternative Facts" genius has been successfully leveraged in other areas - but I digress :-)

UI automation is necessary for accessibility

Posted Jul 14, 2026 6:32 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (2 responses)

It's genius because it's as simple as saying the opposite of the truth - and it works!

My mobile phone plan started out years ago with a fairly-low-but-acceptable monthly data cap but the limit has by now ascended into such stratospheric heights that, as far as I'm concerned, it might as well not exist at all. There are probably people who manage to bump up against it but I'm not one of them. I have no problem with “unlimited” really meaning “unlimited (within reason)” if it prevents bandwidth hogs making things worse for everyone else.

UI automation is necessary for accessibility

Posted Jul 14, 2026 12:39 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

That is fair: the truth is often "practically unlimited unless you pre-download more TV series than you have time to watch". But my main point stands: the "unlimited" is what adresses the micro-payment anxiety. I think that anxiety is strong because humans are so bad with numbers.

UI automation is necessary for accessibility

Posted Jul 16, 2026 4:35 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Back when it was the home Internet service doing data caps, I really wanted ads to have to specify "time to cap exhaustion at advertised maximum speed" as well. That "400 Mbps" isn't very useful if you slam into the data cap on day 3. As I did when visiting my parents while they were trialing some 4G home internet box (they went back to cable Internet service after that).

Unlimited mobile data plans

Posted Jul 14, 2026 8:55 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

And regulation has taken care of that trick, in many jurisdictions; if the plan is "unlimited", there can be no limits applied just because you've used more than a certain amount of data.

Which is why you get plans with 50GB of full speed data, and unlimited data at 1 Mbit/s on top of that, or plans where users who use more than 1 TB/month are selected to experience worse effects from congestion (but are unaffected where the cellular network is not congested), or other variants that make it clear that you're not getting a truly unlimited plan.