Your post gave me deja vu to an automation workflow I cobbled together a few months ago, which I found wonderfully productive for steering a bot: Vimperator key

Your post gave me deja vu to an automation workflow I cobbled together a few months ago, which I found wonderfully productive for steering a bot: Vimperator keybindings. Selenium can use most of them right out of the box. It's a terrific navigation layer. For instance, pressing "f" enumerates all the visible links on the page and assigns to each one a keybinding. The keybindings are displayed in tooltips and can be trivially extracted with CSS. You can keep sending keys to the browser, and only links that contain the anchor text remain in the set of candidates. Of course the "hashing" of links to keybindings is completely relative to the viewport, so this won't satisfy you completely. But it was an idea I had randomly one day, as an alternative to the trapeze act of navigating through the boughs of the DOM tree, and lo and behold it worked nicely.