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Incalculable Loss
Accessibility Without Sanitizing the Art
The original NYT piece was built as a continuous scroll with no semantic structure, making screen reader traversal disorienting and nonlinear. Custom links were largely non-functional, creating dead ends for keyboard users. Emotional and narrative content — obituary snippets, death counts, individual stories — was invisible to assistive technology. The Cooper Hewitt had no mechanism to surface the piece's meaning to users who couldn't see it, and no permission to touch the original code.
Designed a persistent side panel delivering a structured, screen-reader-friendly linear narrative path synchronized with the scroll experience. Developed a three-level content taxonomy — death date and count, white card text, individual background obituaries — mapped to custom keyboard shortcuts for direct navigation. The key decision was maintaining two paths: a linear guided experience that honors the scroll, and an autonomous navigation mode for users who want control over their own path through the content.
- Persistent side panel providing synchronized linear narrative path for screen reader traversal
- Three-level keyboard navigation taxonomy with custom shortcut layer for autonomous exploration
- Accessible entry state designed to communicate the piece's intent before the user encounters its chaos
- BeautifulSoup HTML analysis identified specific class targets for non-destructive overlay implementation
- WCAG 2.1+ annotated Figma prototype covering every keyboard pattern and ARIA implementation
- Full case study and technical recommendation document delivered to Cooper Hewitt as stakeholder artifact
Accessibility and artistic intent are not opposites — they require negotiation
The hardest design constraint wasn't technical. It was philosophical: the piece is inaccessible by design. Its chaos, its overwhelming scale, its refusal to organize — these are the artistic statement. Making it accessible without sanitizing that statement required understanding what the experience is meant to do emotionally, then finding ways to honor that through structure. That negotiation is the work.