Tyrer's Law
Real. This entry is about something real, written from outside the CharliVerse.
Tyrer's Law is the diagnostic law of the Tyrer Framework:
In open technological systems, inaccessibility tends to increase over time as interfaces drift toward the dominant sensory modality of their designers.
It is a claim about system behaviour, not intent. It explains a pattern blind and disabled users know well: tools that begin accessible gradually become unusable, though nobody meant them to.
The mechanism
Most designers are sighted, and for sighted people visualisation is not just presentation; it is a thinking tool. As a system grows more complex, the instinctive response is visual: dashboards instead of logs, flowcharts instead of explanations, icons instead of labels, layout instead of sequence. "This is not carelessness. It is cognition."
Open systems sharpen the tendency. They are fast and under pressure to show progress, and a screenshot of a new dashboard persuades a sighted stakeholder in two seconds. Accessibility needs constraint and maintenance, and is invisible when present.
The result is a ratchet. Every cycle adds visual complexity, every addition is a possible regression, and accessible adaptations, always reactive, trail behind. The gap widens. The system drifts.
What it produces
The law produces not inconvenience but information casualties. Wherever visual complexity grows faster than accessible structure, casualties follow.
Why it persists
Feedback is asymmetric. The people most affected are the least represented in design; sighted developers, testers and stakeholders don't experience the regression, and hear about it only when it is entrenched and expensive to fix. Standards such as WCAG are the most disciplined counter-force there is, and permanently necessary, but "they slow the law; they do not repeal it."
Can it be broken?
No earlier technology has disrupted the law. The AI structural break is the first that could weaken it, by removing the compulsion to encode information visually at all. The Zero Information Casualty standard is built as a structural defence against the drift.
Behind the scenes
A real idea, from The Tyrer Framework, by Charli-Jo Tyrer (Carrados, 2026), Part One. This entry summarises it; the paper is the authority.