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.