I constantly hear about research into functional programming, and even real things coming out of them, like certain programming languages (idris).
Is there anything like this for frontend UI dev? It doesn’t have to be FP related.
Concepts like Reactive programming are widely used in web/UI contexts. The problem of connecting a UI to an underlying data set is not trivial. Several frameworks deal with this.
As was already said, concerns like Accessibility are studied academically. They have more to do with user experience than the technology, so not sure if they match your question.
On the web, there’s semantic HTML and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines which focus on making content for the Internet as broadly interoperable and accessible as possible. The former from a technical point of view, the latter from a human interaction point of view. They go together hand on hand.