Reconstruction Casualty

A Reconstruction Casualty is the fourth of the four classes of information casualty in the Zero Information Casualty standard. The document arrived, the reader was admitted, the meaning was decodable, and the machine reader reconstructed it wrong, silently, and reported the result to the person with confidence. Its question is did it survive being read?

It is the one casualty with no equivalent in screen reader testing. A blind person reading a badly structured page knows something is wrong; she backtracks and hunts for the missing heading, and her confusion is information. A machine reader doesn't backtrack. Faced with an unlabelled table or an implied hierarchy, it resolves the ambiguity by inference, writes a fluent summary and hands it over, and the person gets an answer that is "confident, complete, and wrong", with no sign that anything was reconstructed.

"The Rendering Casualty withholds meaning. The Reconstruction Casualty replaces it. The second is worse, because the first announces itself."

The core test: ask a machine reader to summarise the page and say what it could not determine. "If it does not know what it did not know, neither do you."

Behind the scenes

A real idea, from Zero Information Casualty v1.7, the design standard by Charli-Jo Tyrer and Claude, §1.8 and §4.8. This entry summarises it; the standard is the authority.