UI automation is necessary for accessibility [LWN.net]

UI automation is necessary for accessibility

Posted Jul 15, 2026 13:12 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: UI automation is necessary for accessibility by daroc
Parent article: An update on the scraper situation

Or just serve a page that says "waiting 10 secs to redirect to https ..."

That'll slow down any crawler that waits for previous requests to complete, and will make real humans update their links :-) without inconveniencing said humans *that* much.

Cheers,
Wol

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UI automation is necessary for accessibility

Posted Jul 15, 2026 13:16 UTC (Wed) by daroc (editor, #160859) [Link]

Well, there are two problems with that:

1. Scrapers often don't complete requests on real time; they receive the redirection, and the redirected URL goes on a queue that gets processed minutes or hours later, often by a different IP address.

2. I don't think there's an elegant way to redirect after a timeout without using JavaScript (which we try to keep to a minimum) or tying up server resources with an open connection.

Honestly, clients hitting port 80 isn't a huge problem. Those redirects are relatively cheap to serve compared to serving a page with dynamic content on it. It's annoying, clutters the logs, and they should really take the hint, but it isn't the end of the world.