Aggressively Accessible

Most digital content was authored by sighted people for sighted audiences. The structure is visual. The meaning is often carried by layout, images, and formatting that was never described in words. Accessibility standards require authors to provide that description, and many do not, or do it poorly enough that it conveys little of the intended information. The DOJ Title II mandate sets a compliance floor for public entities, and content still arrives with images that have no useful description and structure that only makes sense on a screen.

An accessible system that depends on that tagging work being done correctly is not fully accessible. It is conditionally accessible, and the condition is one the unsighted user cannot control.

Aggressively accessible is a philosophy about what an accessible system should do instead.

It has two parts.

The first is that spoken language must be a native interface. A native spoken interface is a first-class control path built into the architecture from the start. Every action the system can perform is reachable through it. The goal is full operation without requiring a monitor or a keyboard as the primary means of control. An implementation may not be fully there yet. What matters is that the architecture makes it reachable and that the design is committed to it.

The second is that the system must do the work that authors did not do. Documents arrive as they are. An aggressively accessible system uses all available computation — OCR, vision models, language models, structural analysis — to extract meaning, reconstruct structure, and generate descriptions from content that was never prepared for a spoken interface. The question is not how close the source material is to ideal. The question is what the available tools can do with the source material as it actually arrived.

These two parts depend on each other. A native spoken interface is what makes the second commitment meaningful. Without a stable, first-class spoken path, there is nowhere to deliver the results of that computational work.

Aggressively accessible is a statement about what technology now makes possible and therefore what an accessible system should do.