# Charli-Jo Tyrer: full text Generated from the site's pages at build time. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0). # Charli-Jo Tyrer Canonical page: https://charli-jo.com/ I help organisations create digital services that everyone can use: directly, with assistive technology, or by sending an agent. ## What I do Most accessibility work starts with a finished website and looks for faults. I start earlier, with what people come to an organisation to achieve and what it can actually do for them. From there I model the service, build it with coding agents, and test each journey from start to finish, with screen readers and with agents, until people can complete it and can prove that they did. I have worked in computing and assistive technology for about forty years. I trained as a systems analyst in SSADM and Jackson Structured Programming, spent around thirty years in the charity sector, including at RNIB, and ran my own business training blind people to use technology. I am blind, and I test with a screen reader because that is how I use the web. ## Three pieces of work My practice rests on a principle, a method and a standard. Each can be adopted on its own. ### The principle: Universal Digital Involvement A service should be designed from the outset to be open to all people, and to the agents they authorise to act for them. Nobody is an exception requiring special accommodation, whether they arrive by screen, screen reader, voice, braille or agent. Involvement is not something we do for people who might otherwise be left out. It is a property of a well-designed service, and everyone is in it. [Read the Universal Digital Involvement proposal](/principle/) ### The method: Agent-First Accessible Service Design The method revives systems analysis for the age of agents. It looks at an organisation from the outside, separates what a service does from how it was built, models it around human intentions, and then builds and tests it. At its centre is the Completion Chain, six links that every journey must hold: Intention, Understanding, Authorisation, Action, Evidence, Correction [Read about Agent-First Accessible Service Design](/method/) ### The standard: Zero Information Casualty Zero Information Casualty (ZIC) is a web design specification. It makes sure that whatever a site publishes reaches every reader, whether a person, assistive technology or an agent a person sent, without meaning being lost on the way. It asks four questions: can they read it, is the person's reader allowed in, did it actually arrive, and did it survive being read? [Read about the Zero Information Casualty standard](/standard/) ## How we could work together Start with one journey. I look at your public website and services from the outside, with no logins, source code or hosting details needed, and reconstruct what your service actually does. Then I propose how one important journey could work for everyone, build a working prototype, and test it. If it is useful, we go further. If it is not, you have lost very little. - Outside-in service review - A working prototype of one service journey - Agent-first rebuilds of websites and services - Zero Information Casualty audits - Talks and training on agents and accessibility ## Get in touch Email me at . --- # Universal Digital Involvement *A proposal by Charli-Jo Tyrer. Version 1.1, October 2026.* Canonical page: https://charli-jo.com/principle/ ## Contents 1. [The principle](#the-principle) 2. [Why “involvement”](#why-involvement) 3. [The problem with inclusion as we practise it](#the-problem-with-inclusion-as-we-practise-it) 4. [Where this comes from](#where-this-comes-from) 5. [What the principle means](#what-the-principle-means) 6. [A guard against “everyone”](#a-guard-against-everyone) 7. [Five commitments](#five-commitments) 8. [How it fits with method and standards](#how-it-fits-with-method-and-standards) 9. [For publishers and agent visibility](#for-publishers-and-agent-visibility) 10. [What changes](#what-changes) 11. [An invitation](#an-invitation) ## The principle > *A service built for universal digital involvement is designed from the outset to be open to all people, and to the agents they authorise to act on their behalf. People may use it directly, through assistive technology, or by delegating tasks to an agent. None of these forms of participation is treated as an exception requiring special accommodation.* Under this principle, getting people involved stops being a department, a programme or a concession. It becomes a property of the service itself, and it serves everyone with a stake in being understood: disabled people, every other user, and every organisation that wants agents to find it and act on what it offers. ## Why “involvement” Digital inclusion is a recognised field, but the word has become passive. You are included by someone else, often after being labelled as needing it. Involvement is active: you are in the service, doing something, on your own terms or through an agent you chose. It also speaks to two audiences at once. A blind member of a charity and a business that wants AI agents to recommend it are asking for the same thing: to be fully involved in how services are found, understood and used. In the UK, “involvement” also means user involvement and co-production, where people help design the services they use. That meaning is welcome here, and disabled people leading evaluation is part of the principle. But the main claim is wider: every person, and every authorised agent, can take part in a service on equal terms. ## The problem with inclusion as we practise it For most of the digital era, inclusion has been remedial. We build digital services, then we worry about the people who can’t use them. We provide training, assistive technology, alternative formats, helplines and assisted-digital routes to bring those people in. However well-intentioned, this makes inclusion something added afterwards, aimed at groups labelled disadvantaged: disabled people, older people, people with little digital experience, people without the right device or connection. That model asks the wrong question. It asks: who are we leaving out, and how can we help them in? It assumes the service is fixed and the people are the variable. It makes inclusion a cost centre, something to be funded, justified and, when money is short, cut. Universal Digital Involvement asks a different question: > *How do we design a service that is open to everyone, whether they approach it directly or through an agent?* ## Where this comes from The idea that design should begin with everyone, rather than accommodate exceptions afterwards, is not new, and this proposal stands deliberately in that tradition. The social model of disability located exclusion in the design of the world rather than in people’s bodies. Universal design, developed by the architect Ron Mace and colleagues, argued that environments should be usable by all people without adaptation. Inclusive design in the UK, Design for All in Europe and Universal Design for Learning in education each carried the same conviction into their own fields. Universal Digital Involvement takes that conviction and does two things with it. **It applies it to digital services as whole systems, not just interfaces.** Accessible pages are necessary but not enough. A person can perceive and operate every page of a website and still be unable to find the right service, complete an application, or establish whether it succeeded. Involvement has to hold across the whole journey, from what someone wants to what they can prove happened. **It recognises agents as a legitimate way to participate.** This is the new part. Increasingly, people will approach organisations through AI agents acting on their behalf. Some will do so because of disability, others because of time, language, confidence or plain preference. Delegating to an agent is not a workaround for people who can’t manage the “real” interface. It is participation. A service that turns away an authorised agent turns away the person who sent it. ## What the principle means ### All people Not only disabled people, older people or those categorised as needing help, but everyone. Every route into the service, whether by screen, screen reader, voice, switch, braille display, phone, or an agent, is a first-class route, designed and tested as such. This is a design commitment, not a promise that one interface can meet every need in every circumstance. No single route can. The commitment is that a service offers equitable routes to participation, tests actively for who is excluded, and provides effective alternatives where one route cannot serve someone, without treating those people as exceptions. ### And the agents they authorise Agents are designed for, not tolerated. A service’s information, capabilities, rules and outcomes are available to an authorised agent in a form it can reliably understand and act on, with no need to impersonate a sighted person clicking through a screen. ### Within legitimate authority Openness to agents does not mean unrestricted access for any software that turns up. Authentication, consent, privacy and security remain essential. What changes is the default: the ability to act through an authorised agent is designed in, with clear limits, rather than blocked by habit or bolted on reluctantly. Permissions are understandable, limited and withdrawable. An agent should never need to disclose someone’s disability or personal circumstances simply to discover what a service offers. Organisations can have good reasons to restrict automated access. The test is whether a restriction is proportionate to a real purpose, and whether meaningful authorised participation remains possible. The key is to distinguish why a machine has arrived. Declining to have content used for model training, or refusing bulk scraping, is a legitimate choice. Turning away an agent acting for a particular person is a different act: it shuts that person out. A blanket block that cannot tell the two apart fails the test. ### With people in control Involvement through an agent is only involvement if the person stays in charge. They must be able to understand what is being done in their name, decide what is permitted, verify what happened and correct it when it goes wrong. An agent that acts confidently and reports success it cannot evidence is not involvement. It is a new kind of exclusion with better manners. ## A guard against “everyone” Designing for everyone has a known failure mode. It can quietly become designing for an imagined average person and calling the result universal. Specific barriers vanish into the general case, and the people who experience them stop being the ones who judge the outcome. Universal Digital Involvement rules this out explicitly: > *Designing for everyone does not mean designing for no one in particular. Disabled people remain the test of whether a service is genuinely open, and they lead its evaluation.* WCAG and equivalent standards remain the baseline for interfaces. The principle sits above them, not instead of them. ## Five commitments An organisation adopting Universal Digital Involvement commits to the following: 1. **Involvement is designed in, not added on.** Every service is specified from the start for direct use, assistive technology and authorised agents. 2. **Every route is first-class.** No form of participation is a fallback, and none is quietly unsupported. Where one route cannot serve someone, an effective alternative is provided. 3. **Agents act within clear authority.** Permissions are limited, understandable and withdrawable, data is kept to the minimum needed, and any restriction on automated access is proportionate and leaves authorised participation possible. 4. **Outcomes are evidenced.** People, and their agents, can establish what happened, not merely be told that it did. 5. **Disabled people lead evaluation.** Services are judged open when disabled people can complete real tasks, directly and through delegation. ## How it fits with method and standards A principle needs ways to be met. Universal Digital Involvement is the principle. Two pieces of my own work are ways of delivering it, a method and a standard, and others are welcome: | **Layer** | **What it does** | |----------------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | Principle | Universal Digital Involvement: services are open to all people and to the agents they authorise. | | Method | Agent-First Accessible Service Design: analyses an organisation from outside, models its services around human intentions, and builds and tests them so that people can complete tasks directly or through agents, with evidence and control. | | Information standard | ZIC (Zero Information Casualty): a specification that checks whatever a service publishes reaches every reader, human, assistive technology or agent, without loss on the way. It also distinguishes the purposes for which machines arrive, such as search, agents acting for people and model training, so an organisation can decline some purposes without turning away the people its services exist for. | | Interfaces | WCAG and equivalent standards: the established baseline for accessible human interaction. | Each layer can be adopted on its own. A charity can commit to the principle without adopting any particular method or standard. ## For publishers and agent visibility This is not only a disability principle. Organisations working on answer engine optimisation, generative engine optimisation and agent visibility want the same outcome from the commercial side: agents that can find a business, understand what it offers and act on it, whether booking, buying or enquiring. The architecture that lets a blind person’s agent complete a course application is the architecture that lets anyone’s agent complete a purchase. One build serves both. Not every service wants to be found by every agent. A refuge, a safeguarding service or a confidential helpline may have sound reasons to limit discovery. Universal Digital Involvement applies to them just as fully: such services should still be usable by the people entitled to them, directly or through an authorised agent, even when they are deliberately hard for everyone else to find. That changes the economics of accessibility. For decades it has been framed as a cost incurred for a minority. Agent involvement is framed as revenue available from everyone. When the same work delivers both, accessibility stops being the line finance cuts and becomes the work marketing asks for. One condition applies. Universal Digital Involvement is about being understood truthfully, not about being chosen. Services should be honestly legible to agents: accurate about what they offer, clear about their rules, and able to evidence what happened. Techniques that game agents into recommending a service, or that hide its terms, work against the principle. Every step from intention to outcome counts, including evidence and correction, not only the steps that lead to a sale. ## What changes If Universal Digital Involvement is taken seriously, several familiar things look different. - **Involvement moves from budget line to architecture.** It is no longer a programme that can be cut, because it is part of how the service works. - **Assisted digital becomes one route among many.** Human help remains vital, but it is no longer the only answer for people the main design left behind. - **Blocking agents becomes an involvement question.** Turning away an authorised agent is assessed the same way as turning away a person. - **Accessibility work moves upstream.** Instead of auditing finished systems, or simulating disabled users to find faults afterwards, disabled practitioners shape services before they are built. ## An invitation This is a proposal, not a finished doctrine. I’m putting it forward because the arrival of agents is the moment to settle the question. Either agents become one more thing that digital inclusion has to catch up with, or we decide now that services are designed for everyone, however they choose to arrive. I would welcome challenge, refinement and, above all, organisations willing to test it on real services with the people who use them. > *Involvement is not something we do for people who might otherwise be left out. It is a property of a well-designed service, and everyone is in it.* --- # Agent-First Accessible Service Design *An introduction to the method by Charli-Jo Tyrer. Version 1.0, October 2026.* Canonical page: https://charli-jo.com/method/ ## Contents 1. [What is Agent-First Accessible Service Design?](#what-is-agent-first-accessible-service-design) 2. [Why a new approach is needed](#why-a-new-approach-is-needed) 3. [Returning to systems analysis](#returning-to-systems-analysis) 4. [The intention and the outcome](#the-intention-and-the-outcome) 5. [The Completion Chain](#the-completion-chain) 6. [Agents on both sides of the service](#agents-on-both-sides-of-the-service) 7. [Authority, evidence and trust](#authority-evidence-and-trust) 8. [How the method works](#how-the-method-works) 9. [From prototype to working service](#from-prototype-to-working-service) 10. [Migration without reproducing the old system](#migration-without-reproducing-the-old-system) 11. [What makes the method different?](#what-makes-the-method-different) 12. [Questions for further work](#questions-for-further-work) 13. [The underlying principle](#the-underlying-principle) ## What is Agent-First Accessible Service Design? Agent-First Accessible Service Design is a method for understanding, designing and building services that people can use independently, either directly or through AI agents they choose to authorise. It combines established systems analysis with accessibility practice, AI-assisted development and the emerging possibilities of agent-mediated services. The starting point is not a website, an application or a technology platform. It is the relationship between what people want to achieve and what an organisation is capable of doing for them. The method examines an organisation from the outside, reconstructs the services, information, processes and rules behind its existing interfaces, and develops a model of what those services should do. We then turn that model into a working implementation, which is tested against real human intentions and outcomes. > *Understand the service before building the system.* ## Why a new approach is needed For most of the web’s history, the page has been the organising unit of digital service design. Organisations arrange information into pages, build navigation menus around them and provide forms through which people request services or complete transactions. Accessibility work has largely followed the same structure, examining pages, controls and interactions to establish whether disabled people can perceive, understand and operate them. That work remains essential, and WCAG provides a necessary baseline for accessible interfaces. But an accessible collection of pages is not necessarily an accessible service. Someone can navigate every page of a website with a screen reader and still be unable to work out which service meets their needs, how to apply, whether an application has succeeded or what to do when something goes wrong. AI agents make this distinction pressing. Instead of navigating a website themselves, a person might simply say to an agent, “Help me find the technology training I need to get back into work.” The agent must then understand the intention, discover relevant services, establish eligibility, explain the options and perhaps help complete an application. The organisation’s services therefore have to be understandable beyond the particular pages, menus and forms through which they happen to be presented. This does not make human interfaces redundant. It means the underlying service must be designed independently of them. Agent-first does not mean agent-only. It means designing a service whose meaning, capabilities, rules and evidence are available to people directly and, where they choose, to the agents acting on their behalf. ## Returning to systems analysis The method deliberately revives disciplines I practised as a systems analyst, before the modern web and contemporary AI existed. Three ideas from that tradition do most of the work. ### SSADM: the logical and the physical The Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method (SSADM) drew a central distinction between the physical system, meaning how something is currently implemented, and the logical system, meaning what it does independently of that implementation. It moved through four views: | **View** | **Question** | |-------------------|--------------------------------------------| | Current physical | What exists now? | | Current logical | What does the existing system actually do? | | Required logical | What should the system do? | | Required physical | How should the new system be implemented? | These distinctions matter even more in the age of AI coding agents. A website’s navigation menu tells us how somebody once decided to organise information. It doesn’t necessarily describe the organisation, its services or the intentions of the people who use them. Rebuilding the existing pages with newer technology can simply reproduce the same conceptual limitations, only faster. Instead, the method reconstructs the organisation’s logical services from the evidence available, then designs a required logical system around human intentions and outcomes. Existing technology informs the investigation and constrains implementation where necessary, but it does not dictate the service model. ### Jackson Structured Programming: structure follows structure Michael Jackson’s principle was that a program’s structure should mirror the structure of the data it processes. This method applies the same principle one level up: a service’s structure should mirror the structure of the intentions it serves. If people come with five distinct purposes, the service should be shaped around five purposes, not around whatever pages an organisation happened to publish. ### Entity life histories: knowing where things stand SSADM modelled how each significant thing in a system changes over time. An application, a booking or an enquiry moves through states such as received, under review, needing more information, accepted or closed. Many failures in agent-mediated services are really missing life histories. Nothing tells the person or their agent what state something is in, so the agent reports success it cannot evidence. Making those states explicit and visible is the origin of the Evidence link in the Completion Chain. ## The intention and the outcome The method distinguishes between what someone wants and what the service can demonstrably help them achieve. An intention might be: “I want to become more confident using technology.” That may need clarification. Does the person want to use a smartphone, learn workplace software, improve their accessibility skills or become more independent? The service should help them explore those possibilities without silently deciding what they ought to want. An outcome might be: “The person has identified a suitable training course, understood its requirements and successfully enrolled.” An agent can complete a series of actions without fulfilling the original intention, and an organisation can deliver a service correctly without achieving everything the person hoped for. Designing around intentions and verifiable outcomes makes these gaps explicit. It also requires the service to describe its boundaries: what the organisation can provide, what lies outside its responsibilities, and when a person needs another source of help. ## The Completion Chain At the centre of the method is a six-part model of accessible service completion: **Intention → Understanding → Authorisation → Action → Evidence → Correction** Every link is an accessibility requirement. | **Link** | **The question to test** | |---------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | Intention | Can the person express what they want to achieve, including uncertainty or ambiguity? | | Understanding | Can they discover and understand the available options, requirements and consequences? | | Authorisation | Can they decide what should happen and, where appropriate, give an agent permission to act within clear limits? | | Action | Can the task actually be completed, either directly or through authorised delegation? | | Evidence | Can the person establish what happened, rather than relying on an unsupported assertion of success? | | Correction | Can they change their mind, correct an error, withdraw permission, reverse an action where possible or find an appropriate remedy? | An individual page might satisfy WCAG while the wider service fails at one or more of these links. The Completion Chain therefore complements conventional accessibility testing rather than replacing it. It tests whether a service is accessible from the expression of an intention through to a demonstrable result. ## Agents on both sides of the service The method considers two distinct uses of AI agents. The first is agent-assisted service construction, in which coding and analysis agents help investigate existing systems, reconstruct service models, build implementations, find accessibility barriers and make corrections. The second is agent-mediated service use, in which a person’s authorised agent helps them discover, understand and interact with services. These are separate capabilities and must be evaluated separately. An agent’s ability to build an accessible website does not prove that another agent can use the resulting service effectively. Nor does successful agent-mediated interaction prove that the service works for a person using a screen reader without an agent. The method therefore requires three complementary forms of accessibility: - **Direct human accessibility:** people can use the service independently, including with assistive technologies, with WCAG conformance as the baseline. - **Agent-mediated accessibility:** authorised agents can discover relevant information, understand permitted actions and interact with the service reliably. - **Human control:** people remain able to understand, direct, verify and correct what happens on their behalf. None is a substitute for the others. ## Authority, evidence and trust An agent-first service must distinguish between what an agent can technically do and what it is authorised to do. A person might authorise an agent to search for training opportunities, but not to disclose personal information or submit an application without confirmation. Permissions must be limited, understandable and withdrawable. Services must also provide reliable evidence of actions and outcomes. An agent saying “Your application has been submitted” is not evidence that the receiving organisation has accepted it. The service needs to expose meaningful states, confirmations and, where appropriate, references that establish what has happened. Actions should also be classified by whether they can be cancelled, reversed, corrected or only remedied after the event. Privacy and data minimisation are built into the logical design. An agent should not need to disclose someone’s disability, personal circumstances or membership details merely to discover what services are available. None of this can be left entirely to coding agents. It requires organisational decisions, human judgement and appropriate governance. ## How the method works The method has six activities. They draw on the four SSADM views but allow continuous revision rather than a rigid sequence of approvals. ### 1. Observe the current physical system Examine the publicly available service from the outside: its information, navigation, forms, transactions, contact routes, terminology and apparent organisational responsibilities. Access to administrative systems or source code is not needed at this stage. ### 2. Reconstruct the current logical system Determine what the organisation actually offers, which processes exist, what information moves between them and which rules govern them. Record each finding as an established fact, a reasonable inference or a question only the organisation can answer. ### 3. Model intentions and outcomes Identify what people come to the organisation to achieve: their intentions, possible interpretations, desired outcomes, constraints and the boundaries of the organisation’s responsibilities. Consider both people acting directly and people choosing to delegate particular activities. ### 4. Specify the required logical system Design the services independently of any interface or platform. Model information, processes, permissions, life histories and states, evidence, privacy requirements and routes for correction. Apply the Completion Chain to each significant service journey. ### 5. Build with agents Use AI development agents to create a working physical implementation from the logical model, with accessible human interfaces and appropriate machine-readable descriptions of service capabilities and permitted actions. Keep experimentation separate from production systems, with security, privacy, change control and human oversight. ### 6. Evaluate complete tasks Test whether people can achieve defined outcomes, including assistive technology testing, agent-mediated interactions, verification of completed actions and recovery from errors. Failures feed back into the logical model as well as the implementation. A working prototype may expose an incorrect assumption about a service, and testing may reveal that an intended outcome was poorly defined. The model is revised accordingly. ## From prototype to working service AI agents make it possible to move from a logical model to a working prototype very quickly. That speed is valuable, but a convincing prototype is not a dependable service. The method distinguishes three levels of achievement: | **Level** | **What it means** | |--------------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | Model demonstrated | A working prototype shows how the proposed service could operate. | | Service validated | Representative users have completed defined tasks, including direct assistive technology and agent-mediated journeys. | | Production ready | Accessibility, security, privacy, governance, operations, maintenance and service continuity requirements have been addressed. | These levels stop the speed of AI-generated implementation from being mistaken for evidence of readiness. The ambition is to build quickly enough that ideas are tested against working systems, while keeping the discipline needed to deploy them responsibly. ## Migration without reproducing the old system Reconstructing the existing website also produces a content inventory, a URL map and a record of uncertainties that need organisational confirmation. These support a separate migration process, much as SSADM treated data conversion as its own piece of work. Existing content must be accounted for, published links and bookmarks should keep working through redirects, and member information, live transactions, legal obligations and operational dependencies need careful treatment. Migration constraints should be understood early, but they must not turn the new logical design into a reproduction of the existing website. The objective is continuity of service without continuity of unnecessary limitations. ## What makes the method different? None of the individual ingredients is entirely new. Systems analysis has long distinguished logical systems from physical implementations. Accessibility practice has long required inclusive interaction and meaningful user testing. Service design has long examined user needs, journeys and outcomes. What has changed is the practical relationship between analysis, implementation and use. AI agents can now help reconstruct systems, implement designs and make revisions at a speed that changes the economics of development, while other agents increasingly act as intermediaries between people and organisations. The method brings these developments together while keeping human intention, understanding and control at the centre. It does not assume that an agent should always be used, or that technology can decide what a person ought to want. It asks what a service must make understandable, possible and verifiable for people to exercise meaningful choice. ## Questions for further work Version 1.0 establishes the method. These questions are where it most needs testing and collaboration: - How should a service describe its intentions and capabilities so that both people and agents can discover them, without creating another hidden layer that only developers understand? - What is the minimum evidence an agent should obtain before telling someone that an action has succeeded? - How can a small charity express delegated authority in plain language that its trustees can actually approve? - Which parts of the method transfer to organisations that are not themselves accessibility specialists? ## The underlying principle A coding agent can implement a misunderstanding in an afternoon. As implementation gets faster, the scarce skill is the ability to understand what should be built, why it should exist and what would count as evidence that it works. Agent-First Accessible Service Design puts that understanding before implementation. It treats accessibility not simply as a property of pages or controls, but as a property of the relationship between human intentions and achievable outcomes. The purpose is not to make people adapt to systems, or to make agents indispensable. It is to design services that people can understand, direct and use on their own terms, with or without an agent. --- # Zero Information Casualty *A summary. The full specification is published at zeroinformationcasualty.org.* Canonical page: https://charli-jo.com/standard/ Zero Information Casualty (ZIC) is a web design specification. A ZIC site is one where nobody, whether reading directly, using assistive technology, or sending an agent, loses access to public meaning because of how the site is built, admitted or delivered. The full specification lives at its own home: [read Zero Information Casualty v1.7 at zeroinformationcasualty.org](https://zeroinformationcasualty.org/). It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, by C J Tyrer and Claude (Anthropic). ## The four questions ZIC asks four questions of any page: 1. Can they read it? 2. Is the person's reader allowed in? 3. Did it actually arrive? 4. Did it survive being read? ## The four casualties Each question has a matching way that information is lost: - **Rendering:** meaning was encoded somewhere the reader could not decode it, such as in colour or an image alone. - **Admission:** a person was denied information because the reader they sent was turned away. - **Delivery:** the reader was welcome, but the document never arrived. - **Reconstruction:** the document was read, silently misunderstood, and the person was told the result with confidence. ## The sent agent The case ZIC is built around is the sent agent. When a person asks an agent to fetch public information for them, that agent is their way in. Refusing it is refusing them. ZIC therefore requires sites to serve every agent acting on a person's present request, while keeping search indexing and model training as separate decisions that each publisher makes for themselves. ## Where it fits in my practice ZIC is the information standard beneath the other two pieces of work. [Universal Digital Involvement](/principle/) is the principle that services should be open to all people and the agents they send. [Agent-First Accessible Service Design](/method/) is the method for building those services. ZIC makes sure that what a service publishes reaches every reader intact. I use it to build and audit sites, including this one. ## This site charli-jo.com is built to ZIC v1.7. The [accessibility statement](/accessibility/) explains how, and what is published for agents. --- # Accessibility statement Canonical page: https://charli-jo.com/accessibility/ This site is built to conform to [Zero Information Casualty version 1.7](https://zeroinformationcasualty.org/). The aim is that nobody, whether reading directly, using assistive technology, or sending an agent, loses access to anything published here. ## How it is built - Every page is plain, static HTML. No content depends on JavaScript, and the site uses none. - Each page has one main heading, headings in order, landmark regions and a skip link to the main content. - Text sizes are relative, so the site respects your browser's text size and zoom. - Colours meet WCAG AA contrast, rising to AAA if your system asks for more contrast. A dark scheme follows your system setting. - Nothing moves, so there is nothing to switch off for reduced motion. ## Standards and testing The site aims to meet WCAG 2.2 at level AA as a baseline, alongside Zero Information Casualty v1.7. It has been checked with WAVE, and I test it myself with screen readers and with agents as it changes. This is a statement of how the site is built and what it aims for, not a claim of certified conformance. No independent audit has been carried out. The two Word documents offered for download are provided for convenience; the web pages are the accessible versions. This statement was last reviewed on 30 October 2026. ## For agents Agents acting for a person are welcome on every public page. There is a summary for agents at [llms.txt](/llms.txt), the full text of the site in one file at [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt), and a Markdown version of every page alongside it. All of these are generated from the same pages you are reading when the site is built, not maintained by hand. The site's permissions for search indexing and model training are declared separately in its [robots.txt file](/robots.txt). ## Feeds This site does not currently publish articles or posts in a series, so it has no RSS or Atom feed. If that changes, a feed will be added. ## If something does not work Please tell me at . I test this site with screen readers and with agents, but I would rather hear about a barrier than assume there is none.