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.
We gathered to name the obstacles—but the process itself became one of them. The same systems that silence us replicated themselves in real time, even as we tried to describe their harm.
The process was a case study in itself
We were invited into a session to name the barriers we faced—attitudinal, structural, policy, communicational, technological. We were asked to bring truth, to speak from our experience, to share what made participation impossible for us and for those we care for. And we did. We brought clarity and pain. We brought examples and strategies. We told you what hurt, what failed, what pushed us out, what left us bruised. We told you what we needed. But the very structure of that session—the platform, the pacing, the process—echoed everything we were describing. The consultation became a mirror of the problem. We were trying to fix the thing while still inside of it.
Each decision—from the tools to the timing to the facilitation—carried with it an assumption about how people should participate. Each step carried friction. Each barrier we named was embedded in the way you invited us to name it. And though you may not have meant to recreate the problem, you did. We all saw it.
The platform was the first barrier
The collaboration tool was chosen, but not interrogated. Its structure was cluttered. Its canvas was finite. Its navigation required speed, coordination, and visual processing fluency. It lagged under load. The colour contrast was poor. The font was small. The text bled into itself. Sticky notes piled on sticky notes, arranged by whoever had the most confidence or the fastest hands. We were told to add to the ideas of the previous group, but no time was given to process what was already there. The whole board felt frantic, rushed, overloaded, as though it was built for people who could read at speed, move with certainty, think in lists.
There was no audio description of the visual structure. There was no verbal walkthrough. There were no accommodations for those who do not process visually or quickly or synchronously. There was no pause.
And the tool was not neutral. It was an architecture. It assumed a kind of person—fast, verbal, screen-literate, calm under time pressure. And many of us are not that person.
The facilitation modelled the same power imbalance we were naming
We were told what kind of contribution was expected. We were given an agenda that left no space for structural feedback. We were invited to brainstorm, but not to co-design the session. We were told that the document would be closed immediately after the meeting. We were offered no record of what was said, no transcript, no shared understanding of what would happen next. And the facilitator struggled. They could not track the speed of the input. They could not absorb what was being said. They did not synthesise in real time. They were asked to facilitate listening without being given time or space to listen.
In this way, even the facilitator was set up to fail—tasked with appearing collaborative while acting within an inaccessible structure they could not control. And all of us, watching this unfold, were asked to pretend this was participation.
But many of us have been in this position before—where the process fails in the same way the system fails, and the people inside it are asked to act as though it’s working, because naming the failure would make us the problem.
The pace was exclusionary by design
We were rushed. The time was short. The prompts were brief. The framing was abstract. The structure did not account for how long it takes to access memory, to regulate emotion, to translate lived experience into a polite, processable fragment of text. We were asked to rank urgency, but given no shared understanding of what “urgent” means across different disabilities, family contexts, or survival conditions. We were asked to compare our needs to others’. To compete for visibility. To rate what should have already been funded decades ago.
And the session closed before we could finish. And the document disappeared. And the time ran out. And the harm was repeated—not because we did not care, or could not contribute, but because the process collapsed under the weight of its own design.
The design assumed homogeneity
You assumed that if we had one person with a disability in the room, they could speak to all access needs. You assumed that if someone was literate, they could also process visual layouts under time pressure. You assumed that if someone could speak, they could summarise their pain in a sentence. You assumed that if we showed up, we were ready to contribute, rather than still shaking from what it took to get through the door. You assumed that feedback is linear, polite, and neatly packaged. And you built the session accordingly.
But we are not the same. We do not need the same things. And we cannot be poured into your container without overflowing or fracturing or vanishing into silence.
The emotional cost was high, and invisible
Many of us left that session exhausted, overstimulated, dysregulated, and uncertain. We wondered whether our input would be discarded. We worried that our names were now attached to ideas we did not write. We feared that the disarray of the process would be framed as a failure of participants, rather than of the container itself. And most of all, we knew, with the bitter familiarity of repetition, that the barriers we named had once again been recreated in the act of naming them.
And that is a special kind of harm—the kind that makes you feel like even advocacy is inaccessible, even feedback is performative, even hope must be translated into a format that no longer feels like your own.
We are telling you what to fix—by how we struggle in the room
If you are paying attention, the process is the data. The quiet participant is telling you something about pace. The overwhelmed board is telling you something about tools. The off-topic comment is telling you something about framing. The participant who info-dumps a thousand words into a sidebar and apologises for doing so is telling you something about trust. The silence after the session ends is telling you something about exhaustion.
Every misstep is a clue. Every barrier repeated is a feedback loop. If you want to know what to fix, begin by fixing the meeting. Fix the way you ask. Fix the way you collect. Fix the container.
Because the process is the message.
And we are still inside it, waiting for you to notice.
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.
