This work took place within ARIA-AT, a system designed to improve how assistive technologies interpret and render web standards. The stated goal was to improve how test results were presented. The deeper work was about developing shared authority in systems of multiple levels of lived intelligence.
Accessibility systems often fail, not because information is missing within them, but because authority designing those systems is unevenly distributed. Knowledge exists but is siloed. Lived experience is present but treated as input rather than core infrastructure. Decisions are made upstream, while those most affected are expected to adapt downstream. This project intervened at the downstream level.
The co-design workshop brought together people who use screen readers, engineers, designers, and project leads to work side by side. The intent was to surface how people actually reason through complex accessibility data, where meaning breaks down, and where responsibility quietly shifts onto users.
What emerged early was that navigating test reports was not just a matter of presentation. Participants were not struggling to understand tables. They were struggling to maintain orientation while comparing patterns, remembering context, and holding multiple states of information in mind. The structural pattern revealed this cognitive load on the user.
Rather than attempting to simplify the data prematurely, the workshop focused on how people build understanding over time. Activities were designed to slow interpretation down, making visible the assumptions participants brought with them, the data they selected, and the conclusions they drew. This revealed where systems were asking users to do invisible labor to make sense of results.
The workshop generated two prototype directions as hypotheses. One explored dense visual navigation. The other emphasized customization and progressive disclosure. The subsequent critique prioritized alignment over preference. Which direction preserved agency? Which one supported focus rather than fragmentation? Which one acknowledged how people actually move through information when stakes are high?
Across this process, a pattern became clear. Accessibility tooling often treats clarity as a static property. In practice, clarity is something people arrive at gradually, through consistent cues, stable reference points, and the ability to control how information unfolds. When those conditions are absent, even well-structured data becomes inaccessible.
The outputs of this work were intentionally layered. An internal summary created shared understanding among contributors. The workshop itself functioned as a capacity-building space, shifting how participants thought about interpretation rather than prescribing outcomes. A one-page artifact allowed the insight to circulate without collapsing into technical language, so it could travel beyond those present.
The contribution of this work was not a finalized interface. It was re-establishing accessibility as a collective responsibility rather than an individual burden. By treating people with lived experience as co-authors rather than validators, the work challenged a common pattern in standards-driven systems. Accessibility was no longer framed as compliance or optimization. It became a question of how authority, interpretation, and care are distributed across the system.
This insight extends beyond ARIA-AT. Wherever accessibility is treated as a layer added after decisions are made, people will be asked to compensate. Designing for access, in this context, meant designing conditions where understanding could accumulate without requiring constant correction.
Context
This work was conducted as part of an ARIA-AT co-design initiative led by Bocoup, involving people who use screen readers alongside technical and design contributors. Materials included a multi-day workshop, prototype explorations, and summary artifacts intended for continued development of the ARIA-AT web application.