OculOS
Any desktop app as a JSON API via OS accessibility tree
Details
- External ID
- 47285616
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- OculOS
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- March 7, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 18
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7207872078720787
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Single Rust binary (~3 MB) that reads the OS accessibility tree and gives every UI element a REST endpoint. Click buttons, type text, toggle checkboxes — all via JSON. Works as an MCP server too, so Claude/Cursor/Windsurf can control any desktop app out of the box.Windows + Linux + macOS. MIT licensed.
Enrichment
- Theme
- digital accessibility and compliance tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- access desktop apps as json apis
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Exposing a REST or MCP API is easy, but reliably interfacing with native OS accessibility trees across Windows (UI Automation), Linux (AT-SPI), and macOS (AXUIElement) requires deep platform-specific systems programming.
What it would actually take: The architecture requires a Rust binary wrapping native platform accessibility APIs: UI Automation on Windows, AT-SPI2 over D-Bus on Linux, and ApplicationServices/Accessibility on macOS. The hard part is bridging three vastly different accessibility models into a unified element hierarchy and handling OS-level permission boundaries and event loops reliably. It integrates with an HTTP/MCP server using Axum or similar lightweight async runtimes.
Discussion
9 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Custom-drawn UIs (games, OpenGL) have minimal or no accessibility tree, Electron apps expose shallower accessibility tree than native apps, Some GUI toolkits draw lines directly and aren't accessible at all
Feature requests: Python and TypeScript SDKs, CLI tool instead of HTTP service
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 80 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #30 of 81 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 110 days after the earliest competitor.
- JSONaire · ph · 2026-09-19 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Nazamos · ph · 2026-09-10 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Moji · ph · 2026-09-11 · 109 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Backlit Keyboard API for Python · hn · 2026-04-19 · 27 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Linux-based OS with HTML, CSS, JS, and JSON environment · hn · 2026-05-08 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Sketchora · ph · 2026-09-26 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- OpenLogi · ph · 2026-08-23 · 198 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- MōBrowser, a TypeScript-first desktop app framework with typed IPC · hn · 2026-04-14 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.36
Other launches for this product
Same idea, different domain
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