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by willwade 45 days ago
Interesting! I started something - nowhere near as complete as that and quite different but again using accessibility UI elements. The BIG problem I've found is SOOOO much stuff does really poorly having these elements exposed. Here was my approach https://github.com/willwade/app-automate?tab=readme-ov-file#... - What I do here is build UI templates - either using UIAccess OR using a one pass using a vision model.

Now the argument against this on [reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/openclaw/comments/1s1dzxq/comment/o...)

"my experience is the opposite actually. UIA looks uniform on paper but WPF, WinForms, and Win32 all expose different control patterns and you end up writing per-toolkit handlers anyway. Qt only exposes anything if QAccessible was compiled in and the accessibility plugin is loaded at runtime, which on shipped binaries is basically never. Electron is just as opaque on Windows as on macOS because it's the same chromium underneath drawing into a canvas. the real split isn't OS vs OS, it's native toolkit vs everything else."

1 comments

sorry i had missed this! this is extremely interesting. thank you for sharing. i thought about this approach and came to the same conclusions as the reddit thread you shared. then again, it probably works fine for 80% of cases...