Accessibility as information integrity
Carrados is the accessibility and agent-first design work of Charli-Jo Tyrer.
It develops theories, design standards and practical systems for reducing information casualties across people, interfaces, assistive technologies and intelligent agents.
The work begins from a simple observation. Digital systems naturally drift towards the dominant sensory modality of their designers. As interfaces become richer and more visually sophisticated, information is increasingly encoded in ways that exclude other modes of perception. The result is not simply poor usability but information casualties: moments where relevant information fails to reach an observer in time to support perception, action or participation.
Carrados approaches accessibility as an engineering discipline rather than a compliance exercise. It asks how information can survive changes of interface, modality and technology without losing meaning, whether it is being read by a sighted person, a blind screen reader user, a voice interface or an AI agent.
The work is organised around two complementary publications.
The Tyrer Framework
Accessibility as Information Integrity
The Tyrer Framework is a theoretical model describing accessibility as a property of information systems rather than an accommodation for particular users.
It begins with Tyrer's Law, which argues that open technological systems naturally drift towards visual dominance because most designers think visually. This structural tendency produces information casualties as meaning becomes locked behind a single sensory channel. Rather than treating these failures as isolated mistakes or lapses in goodwill, the Framework explains them as predictable consequences of how technology evolves.
The Framework then introduces the Tyrer Accessibility Scale, a civilisational model that measures progress by the proportion of environmental information available to every observer, regardless of sensory modality. It traces a path from today's visually dominant systems through structured semantic information and machine-readable environments towards Perceptual Sovereignty, where relevant environmental information can reach every observer and the probability of information casualties approaches zero.
The Framework also describes the transition from Classical Accessibility to Generative Accessibility, arguing that accessible interfaces should no longer be translations of visual originals but native renderings generated from shared semantic information. It concludes with the Tyrer Doctrine, a design principle stating that no critical environmental information should ever exist in only a single sensory channel, and examines how artificial intelligence creates the first genuine opportunity to weaken the structural drift described by Tyrer's Law.
Together these ideas form an integrated theory of accessibility as information integrity, engineering and infrastructure rather than retrofit or accommodation.
Zero Information Casualty (ZIC)
An agent-first web design standard
Zero Information Casualty (ZIC) is the practical engineering standard derived from the principles of the Tyrer Framework.
Where the Framework explains why information casualties occur, ZIC defines how websites and digital systems can be built to prevent them. It specifies design principles, semantic requirements and technical implementation guidance for preserving public meaning across visual browsers, screen readers, voice interfaces, search engines and AI agents.
The central requirement is simple: no public information should become inaccessible because of the way a site is rendered, delivered or interpreted. A ZIC-compliant site is designed around the semantic layer rather than the visual presentation, ensuring that every meaningful fact exists independently of colour, layout, typography or graphical appearance. The visual interface becomes one rendering of the information rather than its authoritative source.
ZIC extends beyond traditional accessibility guidance by recognising that modern websites are increasingly read by user-directed AI agents as well as human visitors. It therefore distinguishes between accessibility, discoverability and later machine use, requiring sites to remain openly readable by agents acting on behalf of people while allowing publishers to make independent decisions about search indexing and AI training.
Rather than prescribing a particular visual style or technology stack, ZIC defines a set of engineering constraints that allow information to survive changes of interface, device and reader. It aims to produce websites whose meaning remains stable as presentation technologies evolve, making accessibility a structural property of the information itself rather than a translation applied afterwards.
Current work
Carrados is exploring:
- Classical Accessibility and Generative Accessibility — exploring the transition from retrofitted accessibility to systems generated from shared semantic information.
- The API Is the UI Now — examining how headless platforms and APIs make non-visual interfaces first-class citizens rather than accessible adaptations.
- Agent-first publishing — practical patterns for building websites that preserve meaning for people, assistive technologies and intelligent agents.
About Charli-Jo Tyrer
Charli-Jo Tyrer is a blind writer, accessibility thinker and conceptual artist working at the intersection of accessibility, artificial intelligence and design fiction.
Her accessibility work draws on almost four decades of lived experience with access and assistive technology together with current work in semantic web architecture, generative accessibility and AI-mediated interaction. Carrados is the home of that work, bringing together theoretical research, technical standards and practical systems that explore how information can remain accessible across changing technologies and changing ways of perceiving the world.