Availability is not reach

We say that knowledge should reach everyone, and that reaching everyone is the harder half of the job. That sentence is easy to nod at, so here is what we mean by it in practice.

Putting something where people can find it is availability. Availability is cheap, and it is mostly what gets counted. Reach is different: a product has reached someone only once they can afford it, read it in their own language, understand it without specialist vocabulary, begin it without prior expertise, and use it whatever their circumstances. Five conditions. Miss one and the thing is published, not reached.

Cost is the first and the bluntest. A price is a filter, and it filters hardest on the people with the least. We do not have a full answer to this — we are a company and we need money — but we can say what we will not do: no pricing model where the poorest pay the most, and no feature held back that makes the product unusable without it.

Language is the second. Most software is written in English and translated later, if at all. Translating late is expensive, which is the real reason it does not happen. So we write for translation from the first commit: no text baked into images, layouts that survive strings about a third longer, and a plan for right-to-left scripts before there is anything to lay out.

Jargon is the third, and it is the one people defend. A specialist word saves the writer time and costs the reader everything. It is an access barrier in the same category as price — it just does not show up on an invoice. We write interface copy for someone who has not used the thing before and is not a native speaker of its default language.

The fourth is the assumption that you already know where to start. Every product has a shape in its author's head, and the author has forgotten they ever had to learn it. Empty states, first runs, and the words on the first button are where this gets decided.

The fifth is whether a person can use the thing at all. Screen readers, keyboard navigation, contrast, focus. It works with a screen reader. If it does not, that is a bug, and it is filed like one.

None of this is generous. It is the definition of whether we did the job. If a product clears four of the five, we did not reach everyone — we reached most people, which is what everybody else already does.