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standards-proposal-2026-07-05-accessibility.md

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Proposed upstream change to ACCESSIBILITY-STANDARD.md (portfolio-standards)

Status: Draft — not yet opened as a PR against ChelseaKR/portfolio-standards. Author context: Written 2026-07-05 during gtfs-scorecard remediation. The vendored copy of docs/standards/ACCESSIBILITY-STANDARD.md in this repo had been edited in-repo away from the pinned v1.0.1 tag instead of upstreaming the change. That was wrong regardless of whether the new text was accurate, so the vendored file has been restored byte-identical to v1.0.1 (blob 1a80fc25a8b27905523aaa1a7932a13123884d07). This document captures what, if anything, from those edits was actually worth proposing upstream — for a human to file as a real PR on portfolio-standards, not for this repo to self-apply.

The three edits that were made in-repo (now reverted)

  1. Intro paragraph: added "gtfs-scorecard is fully WCAG 2.2 AAA across its site, with a per-criterion Accessibility Conformance Report at its docs/accessibility.md" to the list of repos exceeding the AA floor.
  2. AUTO-GATES table, Lighthouse row: changed "gtfs-scorecard ... runs no a11y CI — it MUST wire LHCI" to "... now ships its ACR and a merge-blocking design-token contrast gate in CI; LHCI, axe-core, and pa11y still to wire."
  3. §2.2 footnote: added "and gtfs-scorecard meets 2.4.12 and 2.4.13 site-wide (3.3.9 is N/A: no authentication)."

Verification against the current repo state (2026-07-05)

Claim Verified? Evidence
Ships a per-criterion ACR at docs/accessibility.md True docs/accessibility.md exists, dated, per-criterion table; docs/vpat.md (VPAT 2.5 Rev, dated 2026-06-22) cross-references it.
LHCI wired, blocking True, but not "still to wire" — it is already wired .github/workflows/pages.yml:44-49, npx @lhci/cli@0.14 autorun against lighthouserc.json (categories:accessibility ≥ 0.95), as a deploy gate. The edit's own claim that LHCI is "still to wire" was already stale when written.
axe-core wired, blocking True, but not "still to wire" .github/workflows/a11y.yml runs pa11y-ci@3 with "runners": ["axe"] — axe is the rule engine underneath pa11y-ci, blocking on push+PR.
pa11y wired, blocking True, but not "still to wire" Same job, --config .pa11yci.json, no continue-on-error.
Merge-blocking design-token contrast gate True pipeline/scripts/check_contrast.py, invoked from Makefile / ci.yml, asserts AAA (7:1) across all themes.
Meets 2.4.13 Focus Appearance site-wide True docs/accessibility.md:74 — "2.4.13 Focus Appearance
Meets 2.4.12 Focus Not Obscured (Enhanced) site-wide Not verified — no evidence found 2.4.12 does not appear anywhere in docs/accessibility.md or docs/vpat.md. Either the criterion was never actually assessed, or it's an oversight in the ACR. This half of edit 3 should not be upstreamed as-is.

What's actually worth proposing upstream

Only the parts that are true and don't require re-litigating the standard's own criticism should move. Suggested real diff for a portfolio-standards PR (post v1.0.1, targeting a v1.0.2 release):

  1. Intro paragraph: safe to add the AAA + ACR sentence, since both are real and dated.
  2. Lighthouse row: do not copy the in-repo edit verbatim (it wrongly says LHCI/axe/pa11y are "still to wire" when they are in fact already blocking). Instead propose: "gtfs-scorecard ≥ 0.95 (ships a blocking LHCI gate in pages.yml, blocking pa11y-ci/axe in a11y.yml, and a merge-blocking AAA design-token contrast gate; performance/CWV categories not yet asserted — tracked as OBS/P1-9)." This is more accurate than either the original v1.0.1 text (now stale in the other direction) or the self-edit.
  3. §2.2 footnote: propose adding only the 2.4.13 claim, with a citation to docs/accessibility.md:74. Leave 2.4.12 out until it is actually assessed and recorded in the ACR — filing that gap is tracked separately (add a 2.4.12 row to docs/accessibility.md as a small follow-up; not blocking this proposal).

Next step (manual, for the repo owner)

Open a PR on ChelseaKR/portfolio-standards against ACCESSIBILITY-STANDARD.md using the language above (not the reverted in-repo edits verbatim). On merge and tag (v1.0.2+), Renovate's custom manager (renovate.json:5-13) will bump docs/standards/.standards-version here and pull the vendored copy through the normal front door.