Sensemaking

The cognitive and social process of giving structure to ambiguous, incomplete, or unfamiliar information so that one can act on it. In HCI and information science, sensemaking is studied as iterative cycles of foraging for information, building mental representations, testing hypotheses, and refining understanding. In accessibility, sensemaking matters because blind, low-vision, deaf, and cognitively diverse users often have to integrate partial cues from screen readers, audio description, tactile or auditory channels, and contextual knowledge to construct understanding that sighted or hearing users get instantly from a glance. Designing for sensemaking rather than just for outcome delivery means supporting exploration, comparison, revisitation, and incremental construction of mental models, rather than collapsing the activity to a single 'answer'.