# Position Principle

> The Position Principle of the ZIC standard holds that equivalent access needs no identical interaction, only that every reader can reach the same position.

**Real.** This entry is about something real, written from outside the CharliVerse.

The **Position Principle** is the second governing principle of the [Zero Information Casualty](https://charli.info/charlipedia/zero-information-casualty/) standard:

> Equivalent access does not require identical interaction. It requires that every reader can reach the same informational and orientational position through a mechanism appropriate to their channel.

The sighted reader sees the hierarchy; the screen reader user hears headings and landmarks; the keyboard user is handed a skip link; the agent parses the page. They don't behave alike and couldn't. The equivalence is not of experience but of **position**: each, by a different road, arrives knowing where the content is, how it is organised and how to go on.

## Two principles, two jobs

The [Single-Sense Rule](https://charli.info/charlipedia/single-sense-rule/) governs how information is encoded. The Position Principle governs whether it arrives. A page can pass the first and fail the second, with every fact in the semantic layer and one class of reader still labouring towards what another gets at a glance. Conformance needs both.

## Structural information

The principle explains two requirements that look like human courtesies. *The main content starts here* is a fact: the eye gets it by glance, the agent from the main element, the screen reader user from landmarks, and the sighted keyboard user from nothing at all, unless a skip link supplies it. The skip link is the keyboard rendering of that fact. Likewise, the focus ring is the only rendering of *where am I?* that a sighted keyboard user has.

## Bounded

The principle binds through the requirements derived from it, not directly. An auditor may not invent a new failure from it, because labour has no threshold, and taken literally it would convict every page ever built. "The principle governs the standard. The requirements govern the site."

## Behind the scenes

A real idea, from [Zero Information Casualty v1.7](https://carrados.com/papers/zic-design-standard/), the design standard by Charli-Jo Tyrer and Claude, §1.15 and §1.16. This entry summarises it; the standard is the authority.