RFR-2026-013: Accessible representation equivalence study

Research opportunity

Determine whether FE artifacts preserve meaning and operability across accessible text, table, graph, and assistive-technology representations.

Background

Representation sensitivity is central, but accessibility is absent from the current evidence base.

Origin documents and trace

• research/operating-system/evidence-dashboard/evidence-dashboard.json, section: representation-format effects
• research/evaluations/FE-BOUNDARY-2026-07-28/RP-FE-BOUNDARY-2026-07-28.md, section: human and machine execution boundaries
• docs/knowledge-artifacts/multidimensional-classification.md, section: representation dimensions

Specific assumption challenged: Procedural meaning survives representation changes relevant to disabled users.

Supporting evidence: Representation-format effects are material, yet no accessibility validation is reported.

Unknowns

• Semantic loss across accessible forms
• Screen-reader operability
• Whether visual structure is an unacknowledged mechanism

Dependencies

• RFR-2026-001

Suggested REP and methodology

Create REP-2026-013. Co-design equivalent artifacts with accessibility experts; test semantic task performance across screen-reader, linear-text, table, and visual graph forms.

Expected outputs

• Accessible benchmark variants
• Equivalence criteria
• Accessibility findings

Success criteria

Disabled participants are included and no representation is labeled equivalent without task-based evidence.

Execution recommendation

• Recommended agent: accessibility research agent
• Estimated effort: medium
• Expected knowledge gained: Tests generality while preventing an inaccessible canonical model.
• Frontier Score: 138
• Score inputs: knowledge gain 3/5; impact 4/5; cross-project reuse 4/5; scientific importance 3/5; dependency cost 3/5; implementation difficulty 3/5.
• Score calculation: 3 × 4 × 4 × 3 − 3 − 3 = 138.
• Score status: structured expert judgment, not measured utility.