A one-line edit under portfolio/research/a11y-evidence-record/ used to start nine GitHub Actions workflows. Each had its own runner start-up and checkout to run a few seconds of pure-Python tests and an offline re-derivation of a committed result file.
A scan of the pull_request path filters in .github/workflows/ found this was the largest shared-path fan-out in the repository: nine workflows for that path and eight for eaa-wcag-triage/.
The nine a11y suites now run as steps of one job, a11y-research-ci.yml. Each step keeps its own working directory, command and failure message, and runs even if an earlier one failed, so a red run lists every broken suite. The trigger paths are the union of the old ones. All 20 steps pass locally. The eaa-wcag-triage workflow stays separate because it needs pytest.
The cost is that a change to one directory now runs all nine suites. They take seconds each, so that is cheaper than eight extra runner start-ups. The measured effect on jobs per PR head is still to come (backlog item P060).