---
date: 2026-08-13
session: phase-6-search-data-accessibility-refresh
severity: high
component: search-data-accessibility
status: resolved
---

# Phase 6 Passed Only After the Review Found What Gates Missed

## Context

Phase 6 refreshed search-facing accessibility contracts across colors, charts, UX guidance, landing patterns, typography, icons, motion, native interfaces, and React guidance. Initial gates passed. Adversarial review still found semantic gaps that those gates did not encode.

## What Happened

- Preserved chart backward compatibility: legacy `Accessibility Grade` remains with `deprecated: use Accessibility Risk`; controlled risk is now required.
- Added role-aware palette validation and generator token export. Natural-language accessibility queries gained explicit coverage and correct routing.
- Repaired decorative, meaningful, and interactive icon semantics; typography family/import/weight agreement; React ref/effect safety; reduced-motion, offscreen, landing-media, and single-pointer alternatives.
- Added form error-summary guidance, strict row-bound provenance, error boundaries, and accurate guide/catalog counts.
- Final evidence: `npm run verify:data` passed 112/112 tests; relevance stayed P@1 0.7763, MRR@3 0.8465, nDCG@3 0.8447, abstention 0.9804, typo recovery/coherence 1.0; 7/7 Playwright tests and all CLI, gallery, mirror, and diff release gates passed.

## Reflection

The brutal truth: we trusted broad green gates that proved files parsed and familiar queries worked, but did not prove the advice was semantically safe. That was our testing failure, not bad luck. It is frustrating to discover after an apparent pass that a chart grade could overclaim conformance, generated colors could lose role meaning, and “accessible” landing guidance could omit actual interaction fallbacks. Relief came only after the adversarial cases became executable contracts.

## Decisions Made

| Decision | Rationale | Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Preserve legacy chart shape; deprecate in place | Deletion would break downstream CSV consumers | Compatibility retained without preserving misleading semantics |
| Enforce strict official-source provenance and validation boundaries | Permissive metadata let unsupported claims survive | Volatile claims now fail closed |
| Expand natural-query and accessibility semantics instead of only adding rows | More rows would amplify retrieval ambiguity | Coverage improved with unchanged relevance |
| Pause after Phase 6 | User explicitly requested a checkpoint | Phases 7–9 remain pending |

## Next Steps

- Main agent owns Phases 7–9 when the user resumes; preserve the Phase 6 release gates on every later change.
- Keep `plans/` local. Do not change `.gitignore` yet; user deferred that decision until the whole plan completes.
- Unresolved questions: none for Phase 6; final relevance threshold promotion remains Phase 9 work.
