UI automation is necessary for accessibility [LWN.net]

UI automation is necessary for accessibility

Posted Jul 15, 2026 15:02 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: UI automation is necessary for accessibility by Cyberax
Parent article: An update on the scraper situation

Step 3 is not stateless. You need to maintain a token bucket and update it with each request.

The state is ephemeral, which does make the problem easier. But it is very much "not free."

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UI automation is necessary for accessibility

Posted Jul 15, 2026 17:23 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Sure, but it doesn't need to be a global state. And realistically, it's not a problem to store a couple of megabytes of data. Assuming that each client ID is 128 bits, that's around 64k clients. If each one of them provides you with even 10 cents, that's a good problem to have!

Moreover, it won't even require a lot of local storage if you use random-based sampling. This was my interview question many years ago :)

The idea is to select a random number from 0 to N and if it's equal to N, you start tracking the requests for this user. Then a standard token bucket is sufficient. You can dynamically vary N depending on the overall load.

UI automation is necessary for accessibility

Posted Jul 16, 2026 8:13 UTC (Thu) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (1 responses)

In what weird kind of dream world do you live in where people are willing or even able to pay 10 cents per request or even per day for every website they visit?

UI automation is necessary for accessibility

Posted Jul 16, 2026 17:28 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

10 cents is the upper limit per day for all the websites that you visit. The idea is that rate-limiting would only affect a visitor if they are already hammering the site with unreasonable number of requests.