Ghost Visitors: AI personas expose the usability barriers that drive site visitors away

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Ghost Visitors is a Hacktoberfest submission that uses locally run personas, driven by the Gemma model, to browse websites the way real users with different needs would. Each persona pursues a goal, such as ordering bread for Día de los Muertos, and files a report describing what made them give up. To prevent the model from inventing complaints, the browser measures load time, page width, tap target sizes, accessible names, font sizes, and contrast, and only complaints backed by a matching measurement count as confirmed problems. Unsupported complaints are kept but labeled as unproven. In demo tests on a broken and a fixed bakery site, a keyboard-only persona got stuck on an unnamed email field and a non-button submit control, while the fixed version was completed successfully. The project is installed with Ollama and Playwright and can be run from the command line or a small local web interface.

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