Accessibility guidance erodes on its own because the error is asymmetric:
writing above a reader reads as respect, writing below them reads as
condescension. Unchecked, the level only climbs, and each pass inherits the
previous pass's ceiling.
The drift is undetectable from inside. Prose is legible to precisely the
reader it was tuned for, and it was tuned for whoever wrote it, so rereading
cannot find it. The failure is also silent for the reader who suffers it: a
newcomer understands every sentence while nothing accumulates, which produces
no complaint and therefore no correcting signal.
Records the consequence that a fact audit cannot catch: over-calibration
compresses rather than omits, so the context is present but expandable only by
someone who already holds it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
