inclusion.md

A repository-level context engineering document for inclusive AI-assisted software development.

Read INCLUSION.md → · npm · companion essay

What it is

INCLUSION.md is a drop-in file that gives AI coding assistants — GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, Continue, and friends — persistent, inclusion-oriented guidance during code generation.

It's the inclusion-focused sibling of A11Y.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, and design.md:

| File | Operationalizes | | ----------------- | ------------------------------------------------------ | | README.md | What this project is | | CONTRIBUTING.md | How humans contribute | | A11Y.md | Technical accessibility compliance | | design.md | Visual and interaction system | | INCLUSION.md | Contextual, representational, sociotechnical inclusion |

Why it exists

AI coding assistants now sit between human intent and the code, copy, and interactions that ship. They generate output based on what's statistically likely given training data — which carries the accumulated biases of the public web, open-source code, and English-language text. That means assistants quietly amplify two kinds of debt:

• Accessibility debt — inaccessible patterns inherited from the public web.
• Representational debt — narrow assumptions about whose communication styles, identities, and lived experiences count as "default."

Neither shows up in your bundle size report. INCLUSION.md is a small, opinionated scaffold to push back. Not a fix — bias mitigation is unsolved — but operational scaffolding that lowers the floor.

For the long version, read the companion essay: The need for INCLUSION.md.

Quick start

npx inclusion-md init

That's it. Node.js 16+ required, zero dependencies. The CLI walks you through a short questionnaire and writes a customized INCLUSION.md to your repo root. Then point your AI assistant at it.

Documentation

| Doc | What's in it | | --------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Getting started | Install, pick a variant, customize Section 1, treat as infrastructure. | | AI assistant integrations | Wire it into Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, Continue, Windsurf. | | CLI reference | All commands, flags, the Design Decisions questionnaire, troubleshooting. | | How it works | How agents load it, the context-window tradeoff, what this is not. | | Examples | Adapted templates: frontend app, design system, backend API. |

Hi, I'm Branon 👋

I'm a design engineer who cares a lot about accessibility. As AI-assisted development became the default for shipping software, I kept thinking about what a11y looks like in this new paradigm — where coding assistants are quietly making thousands of small decisions about who our software is built for. This repo is something I felt was missing from the conversation.

Contributing

Pull requests, issues, translations, domain-specific extensions, and critiques are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

This project takes language and representation seriously. Contributions that improve language guidance, add domain-specific sections, or correct ableist or exclusionary defaults are especially appreciated. Contributions from disabled practitioners and from communities underrepresented in this kind of tooling are prioritized in review.

License & citation

MIT — see LICENSE. Fork, adapt, translate, ship.

If you cite this academically or in industry writing:

Conor, B. (2026). INCLUSION.md: A context engineering scaffold for
inclusive AI-assisted software development. https://github.com/BranonConor/inclusion.md