Applying Accessibility Metrics to Measure the Threat Landscape for Users with Disabilities
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The link between user security and web accessibility is a new but growing field of research.To understand the potential threat landscape for users that require accessibility tools to access the web, we created the WATER framework.WATER measures websites using three security-related base accessibility metrics.Upon analyzing 30,000 websites from three distinct popularity ranges, we discovered that the risk for information leakage and phishing attacks is higher for these users.Over half of the analyzed websites had an accessibility percentage of less than 75%, a statistic that exposes these websites to potential accessibility-related lawsuits.Our data suggests that the current WCAG 2.1 standards may need to be revised to avoid assigning Level AA conformance to websites that undermine the security of users requiring accessibility tools.We make the WATER framework publicly available in the hopes it can be used for future research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it