CONCEPT
Accessibility Condition
The first of Fung's three conditions: that barriers to participation — informational, temporal, financial, geographical, linguistic — must be low enough that affected populations can participate without bearing costs disproportionate to the benefits.
The accessibility condition addresses the gap between formal and substantive openness in participatory processes. A process may be legally open to everyone while being practically accessible only to those with the time, resources, and expertise to navigate it. Fung's condition demands that institutional design actively lower the barriers that exclude affected populations, rather than merely declining to raise them. The condition is violated by processes conducted in technical language during business hours through channels requiring specialized knowledge, even when those processes are formally described as public. It is satisfied by processes designed around the actual constraints that target populations face, as in Porto Alegre's neighborhood-based, after-hours assemblies.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Accessibility is the condition most often confused with mere formal openness. The public comment period on a U.S. federal regulation is legally accessible to any citizen, but substantively accessible only to those familiar with the Administrative Procedure Act, comfortable with regulatory language, and able to invest the