Your Accessibility Committee is a collection of essays written during and participation in a school district’s accessibility committee: a process branded as collaborative, but engineered for control. This series explores institutional betrayal, process theatre, and the architecture of performative inclusion. It’s a record of what happens when access is promised but the implementation falls short—and what it costs to keep showing up anyway.
Before we talk about solutions, or even feelings, we must name what has been done.
We begin in the wreckage
When an institution convenes a committee to explore accessibility, equity, inclusion, or anything vaguely shaped like justice, it often opens with a bright, empty cheerfulness—a blurb about building community, a land acknowledgement read like punctuation, and a call for optimism that feels, to many of us, like a performance held in the foyer of a burning building.
For those of us who enter these spaces carrying the weight of actual harm—of sleepless nights and withdrawal forms, of diagnosis papers and formal complaints, of trauma-induced shutdowns and public outbursts and ruptured trust—it can feel like gaslight wearing a smile. Because you say “welcome,” but we were already here. You say “collaboration,” but we’ve been shouting alone in the parking lot for years. And so I say this gently, but clearly: you must begin by acknowledging what you have done.
That’s not rhetorical flourish. That is process. That is safety. That is truth.
And without it, you cannot proceed.
Good intentions cannot undo exclusion
Intentions are useful only as far as they fuel action and shape impact. They cannot be retroactively applied to erase the effects of inaccessible systems, careless decisions, or delayed support. My child does not feel better when the IEP meeting starts with, “We all care so deeply.” They feel better when they get to use the bathroom without asking three adults for permission. They feel better when they’re allowed to sit on the floor and stim without being stared at. They feel better when they can breathe without monitoring every twitch and blink for signs of disapproval.
And I will be honest with you: my intentions have failed, too.
I have built digital spaces that were inaccessible. I have relied on software without screen reader testing. I have caused harm, without malice, but with real consequence—and the only thing that ever mattered was how I responded when that harm became visible.
What mattered was the bug report, and whether I fixed it.
What mattered was the message I sent to the person affected: I believe you. I am learning. This will change.
Accessibility is not a bonus feature
When institutions treat accessibility like an aspirational add-on—a virtue, a feather in the cap, a sign of modernity—they betray their own confusion about what accessibility is. Accessibility is not something extra. It is not generosity. It is not an upgrade. It is the foundation of rights-based systems—an essential condition for participation, safety, and trust. If people have been harmed by the way your institution functions, then that harm was produced not by their impairment but by the interaction between their needs and your failures to meet them.
Those failures include the things you did and the things you didn’t do. The inaccessible forms. The staff who weren’t trained. The repairs that were deferred. The technologies banned without alternatives. The vague norms. The behavioural rubrics. The gaslighting. The cheerfulness in the foyer.
The refusal to say, “We know this has hurt you.”
Institutional harm is cumulative, intimate, and very often lethal
I want to speak plainly here, because so much of this work is buried under euphemism. The impact of inaccessible systems is not minor. It is not discomfort, frustration, or inconvenience. It is grief. It is despair. It is the moment when a child collapses after school and says, “I wish I didn’t exist.” It is the parents holding their breath when the phone rings again. It is trauma accumulated over years—until it becomes illness, or dissociation, or total withdrawal from systems meant to serve.
You cannot enter a conversation about accessibility unless you understand this: some people are dead because of your institution.
And many more have come close.
If you do not believe that, if you cannot bear to let it in, you are not yet ready to be in this work.
An apology is not liability—it is leadership
Institutions often avoid acknowledging harm out of fear—fear of legal risk, of reputational loss, of inviting scrutiny they feel unprepared to answer. But silence does not protect you. In fact, it is the fastest path to escalation. If you mishandle early conversations—by minimizing harm, misrepresenting feedback, or failing to act—you increase the likelihood of litigation, protest, and reputational damage. And far more importantly, you lose the trust of the very people you claim to serve.
Apology, when offered sincerely and without caveat, is not only ethical—it is strategic. It makes room for repair. It builds the conditions for collaboration. It tells survivors that you believe them, that their voices are valued, and that your institution is capable of humility.
Those who show up to your process have already taken a risk. They could be elsewhere. They could be suing you. They could be documenting your failures for public record. And still, they showed up.
That is a gift.
Start by receiving it.
Listening surfaces pain, and pain reveals the truth
Many institutions misread feedback as a problem—too intense, too emotional, too unpredictable to manage. But emotion is not a barrier to clarity. It is often the only honest indicator of impact. When someone shakes while they speak, or cries in a meeting, or dissociates mid-sentence, you are witnessing the result of everything that came before. That moment is not new. It is the outpouring of years.
If you want access to truth, you must be willing to witness pain.
If you want to build trust, you must be willing to hear the unvarnished version.
And if you want to change, you must let those who have been harmed tell you exactly how, when, and why it happened—in their own words, unfiltered and unpolished.
There is no ethical shortcut
You cannot recruit disabled people onto your committee and skip the step where you say: We have failed you. You cannot run a design sprint and skip the history. You cannot send a survey and skip the reckoning. Those who survive harm know when they are being used as cover. They know when your process is performance. They know when your invitation is a trap.
To avoid repeating the pattern, you must acknowledge the pattern. You must say: This institution has caused harm. That harm has been emotional, physical, structural, and cumulative. It has left scars. And we are here now not to manage your pain, or reframe it, or analyse it to death. We are here to end it. And that begins with truth.
Your Accessibility Committee
A collection of essays written during and after my participation in a school district’s accessibility committee: a process branded as collaborative, but engineered for control. This series explores institutional betrayal, process theatre, and the architecture of performative inclusion. It’s a record of what happens when access is promised but the implementation falls short—and what it costs to keep showing up anyway.
