The Measure of Accessibility

A six-page treatment of what accessibility is, how to measure it, and why the answer matters. The political framing of the question; the formal distinction between functional and intrinsic accessibility; the rejection of utilitarianism; the methodological substrate that lets the formal definitions be built rather than just stated; and the communities-of-practice framing that opens onto the 2029 framework.

Accessibility is the outcome of the encounter between an entity’s capacity to interact and its users’ physical and cognitive capabilities, with capacity, capability, and accessibility all expressed as measurable and quantitative properties.

The six pages

  1. The Question — the political framing. “What is accessibility and how do you measure it? The answer is wholly political.” The hammer-and-nail line. The spectrum from insertion-into-existing-society to universal-access-by-design. Why current vocabularies (legal, ergonomic, usability) underdetermine the answer.
  2. Functional Accessibility — the formal definition with notation. The negotiation framing between user and provider. Multi-medium robustness. Legal-rights scoping and its limits.
  3. Intrinsic Accessibility — the contrast with functional. The pseudo-user formalism. The proof of an optimal pseudo-user set independent of provider. Why intrinsic generalises where functional doesn’t.
  4. Equivalent Experience — the timing dimension; the equality argument; the rejection of utilitarianism. “We are all equal members of society with the same right to access goods and services.” Why “the greatest good of the greatest number” is the wrong frame.
  5. The Shlaer-Mellor lens — recursive design as accessibility. Bridged semantic domains, model compilation, the four-decade engineering lineage. The methodological substrate that makes formal definitions buildable rather than just stated.
  6. Communities of Practice — UI as community of practice; user populations as community of practice with memetic profile evolution. Inaccessibility as community dysfunction. The opening into multi-agent / 2029 territory.

How to read it

The collection forms a coherent linear read for someone who wants the whole position. Each page also stands alone — the cross-links inside each page point at the others where the dependency matters. The shortest legitimate route through the position is The Question → Functional → Intrinsic; the substantive depth-stop is the full six.

Pages are landing in stages; substantive prose drafts are in progress.