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The Severed Loop

The Distance Between Breaking and Fixing

By Rina Takahashi— June 3, 2026

Feature image for article: The Distance Between Breaking and Fixing

When a browser agent can't click the right date on a booking page, the failure log blames the model. The page was already broken for screen reader users, years before agents existed. Screen readers learned to compensate so well that developers never got the signal to fix anything. Now agents have plugged into the same infrastructure and inherited two decades of unrepaired damage. Each workaround, built by the people closest to the pain, quietly widened the gap between breaking and fixing.

The Severed Loop

The Distance Between Breaking and Fixing

By Rina Takahashi— June 3, 2026

When a browser agent can't click the right date on a booking page, the failure log blames the model. The page was already broken for screen reader users, years before agents existed. Screen readers learned to compensate so well that developers never got the signal to fix anything. Now agents have plugged into the same infrastructure and inherited two decades of unrepaired damage. Each workaround, built by the people closest to the pain, quietly widened the gap between breaking and fixing.

94.8%

The Fix That Masks the Problem

WebAIM Million, 2026: 94.8% of the top million home pages contain detectable accessibility failures. Pages using ARIA average 59.1 errors. Pages without it average 42.

That inversion tells you everything. ARIA lets developers declare accessibility intent. A developer adds a role attribute, nothing visibly breaks, they move on. The screen reader user who hits the wall has no channel back to the person who built it. Twenty-five years of that silence, and the remedy has quietly become the mask.

94.8%

The Fix That Masks the Problem

WebAIM Million, 2026: 94.8% of the top million home pages contain detectable accessibility failures. Pages using ARIA average 59.1 errors. Pages without it average 42.

That inversion tells you everything. ARIA lets developers declare accessibility intent. A developer adds a role attribute, nothing visibly breaks, they move on. The screen reader user who hits the wall has no channel back to the person who built it. Twenty-five years of that silence, and the remedy has quietly become the mask.

TAKE NOTE

Sixfold growth: ARIA attributes per page have increased six times over since 2019, jumping another 27% in the last year alone

Same failures: The six most common accessibility error types haven't changed across seven consecutive years of analysis

Broken menus: 22% of pages implementing ARIA menus introduced new barriers by omitting required keyboard interactions and markup

Page bloat: Average page elements reached 1,437 in 2026, up 22.5% in one year, compounding every layer of accessibility debt

Invisible gap: ARIA failures surface only in assistive technology, never in the visual render developers see, so nothing looks broken to the people who could fix it

Still Broken, Now Load-Bearing

Fifteen Years of Saying the Same Thing, and Now the Robots Are Listening

Still Broken, Now Load-Bearing

Fifteen Years of Saying the Same Thing, and Now the Robots Are Listening

Frames and Fixes

The Frame That Wins

When ai.txt was proposed as a successor to robots.txt, two companies signed on. The three that mattered didn't. The proposal was well-designed. It was also a coordination mechanism applied to a power asymmetry. The same pattern shaped RPA governance a few years earlier. In both cases, the winning frame was held by people insulated from the failure it described. That insulation is what keeps the frame in place.

Frames and Fixes

Consequences as Architecture

If voluntary coordination almost never closes a severed feedback loop, what has? HTTPS adoption and GDPR enforcement are the clearest cases, and they share a specific shape: someone occupied a chokepoint, reduced the cost of compliance beforehand, and escalated consequences gradually rather than delivering them as a single absorbable event. Most broken feedback loops lack all three conditions. Most institutions would rather convene a working group.

Frames and Fixes

The Frame That Wins

When ai.txt was proposed as a successor to robots.txt, two companies signed on. The three that mattered didn't. The proposal was well-designed. It was also a coordination mechanism applied to a power asymmetry. The same pattern shaped RPA governance a few years earlier. In both cases, the winning frame was held by people insulated from the failure it described. That insulation is what keeps the frame in place.

Frames and Fixes

Consequences as Architecture

If voluntary coordination almost never closes a severed feedback loop, what has? HTTPS adoption and GDPR enforcement are the clearest cases, and they share a specific shape: someone occupied a chokepoint, reduced the cost of compliance beforehand, and escalated consequences gradually rather than delivering them as a single absorbable event. Most broken feedback loops lack all three conditions. Most institutions would rather convene a working group.

Frames and Fixes

The Frame That Wins

When ai.txt was proposed as a successor to robots.txt, two companies signed on. The three that mattered didn't. The proposal was well-designed. It was also a coordination mechanism applied to a power asymmetry. The same pattern shaped RPA governance a few years earlier. In both cases, the winning frame was held by people insulated from the failure it described. That insulation is what keeps the frame in place.

Frames and Fixes

Consequences as Architecture

If voluntary coordination almost never closes a severed feedback loop, what has? HTTPS adoption and GDPR enforcement are the clearest cases, and they share a specific shape: someone occupied a chokepoint, reduced the cost of compliance beforehand, and escalated consequences gradually rather than delivering them as a single absorbable event. Most broken feedback loops lack all three conditions. Most institutions would rather convene a working group.