Accessible Communication & Inclusive Design

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Abstractions about ensuring communication and interfaces work for people with varied abilities — accessibility design principles (perceivable design, operable design, motion-triggered harm), augmentative and functional-communication assessment (AAC, functional communication), and communication-theory or neural models of goal-directed messaging (goals-plans-action theory, salience network).

8 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) — Support or replace failing speech not by handing over a device but by running a clinical pathway — assess residual capability across four channels, match a modality to it, design a core vocabulary, train the communication partners, and migrate the system as the condition changes.
• Correction Burial — The editorial pathology in which a correction reaches a systematically smaller audience than the error it repairs — the original ran at high amplitude, the correction at low — so the public belief record stays unrepaired even though a correction was formally issued.
• Functional Communication — Judge a communicative act by whether it accomplishes a needed real-world function with a real partner — request, refuse, greet, comment, ask for help — rather than by its phonological accuracy or grammaticality, reclassifying every non-speech channel as a first-class success.
• Goals–Plans–Action Theory — A communication-theory family in which a primary interaction goal activates planning, secondary identity, interaction, resource, and arousal concerns shape the plan, and an adapted message is enacted as intentional communicative action.
• Motion-Triggered Harm — The inclusive-design failure in which interface animation, autoplay, parallax, or screen flash exceeds a susceptible user's physiological tolerance — a presentation channel that doubles as a harm channel, delivering an involuntary stimulus the median-calibrated design never accounted for.
• Operable Design — The commitment that every action an artefact requires must have at least one operationally-equivalent alternative path across input modalities and motor envelopes, so users are not gated out by assumptions about how actions are performed.
• Perceivable Design — Require that every essential signal an interface conveys be decoupled from any single sensory channel and offered through an alternative at sufficient fidelity, so a user shut out of one channel — vision, hearing — is not excluded.
• Salience Network — Model a control network — anterior insula and dorsal ACC hubs — that detects behaviourally relevant events and switches the brain between its two content networks (internally directed default mode and externally directed executive), so cognition is read as a configuration plus a switching variable rather than a catalogue of regions.