Web Proxy

A web proxy (or intermediary) is a server that sits between a user's browser and the origin web server, intercepting and potentially modifying HTTP requests and responses as they pass through. In the context of accessibility, proxy-based systems have been used to transform web content on-the-fly to improve accessibility without requiring changes to either the origin website or the user's client software. These accessibility proxies can perform transformations such as enforcing color contrast, replacing images with alt text, removing animations, linearizing tables, stripping JavaScript, and adding keyboard shortcuts. While proxy-based accessibility solutions can address some barriers at web scale without site owner cooperation, they are limited to surface-level transformations and cannot address deeper semantic accessibility issues that require understanding of author intent. Modern accessibility overlays are conceptual descendants of this approach.