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.
This work requires transformation, not performance. Your legacy is not what you protected. Your legacy is what you changed when you were told it was failing.
Leave your laurels at the door
Accessibility work is not about legacy preservation. It is not about titles or tenure or whether your department once won an innovation award in 2017. It is not about which email signature holds the most honourifics or who spoke at which conference or who chaired what committee in the past decade. It is not your CV.
It is about your willingness to stop harm.
And that means you will be receiving a lot of negative feedback, so buckle up!
You will be told that what you designed failed. You will be told that your flagship initiative has made things worse. You will be told that your most cherished assumptions—about process, or structure, or pedagogy, or institutional trust—are the very things that must be dismantled.
If you cannot bear that, then you are not doing accessibility work.
You are doing ego maintenance.
And that is a fundamentally different project.
Failure is not the opposite of progress—it is the doorway
There is no shame in being wrong. The shame comes from refusing to change once the truth is known. To be wrong, and to listen—to adjust, to repair, to rework what once seemed solid—is the most basic requirement of growth. In digital design, we expect iteration. In software, we plan for bugs. In science, we invite replication. In community, we expect to be corrected.
But in institutional settings—especially educational and medical ones—ego clings to authority like a barnacle. The professional class has been trained to equate knowledge with control, and control with value. So when a disabled person says, “This policy is hurting my child,” or “This form excludes me,” or “I can’t participate because of the way you’ve structured this process,” the instinct is rarely to pause and reflect. It is to defend, to explain, to pivot back to process, or to interpret the statement as tone, not content.
But truth is not an attack.
And listening is not surrender.
The courage to listen is the measure of your readiness
I have always found that the most powerful people are the ones who can change direction mid-sentence—who can pause, absorb something hard, and say, without performance, “You’re right. I didn’t know that. Let me fix it.”
I don’t mean the ones who perform contrition like a TED Talk, or who open meetings with land acknowledgements but shut down conversation about systemic harm. I mean the ones who actually sit with discomfort until it turns into insight. The ones who understand that expertise without humility is a form of violence. That the credentialed voice can wound just as deeply as the cruel one. That certainty, when applied carelessly, becomes a tool of erasure.
If you are afraid of being wrong, then you will never hear the voices who can teach you most.
And if you refuse to adjust when you are wrong, you are building systems that centre your comfort instead of our survival.
Ego thrives in silence, and silence costs lives
When someone from your institution says, “We didn’t mean to exclude you,” what they are often defending is their sense of moral selfhood—their identity as someone who cares, someone who tries, someone who would never cause harm. But identity is irrelevant to those of us harmed by the system. What matters is outcome. What matters is whether my child got the support they needed. Whether the bathroom was accessible. Whether I could speak without shaking. Whether the policy changed. Whether the meeting notes reflected what I actually said.
You may mean well, but if you speak over me to explain your intent, you are choosing your ego over my voice.
You may work hard, but if you ignore what I am saying because it threatens your narrative, you are choosing your ego over our safety.
You may be proud of your department, your school, your unit, your plan—but if you treat feedback as disloyalty, you are choosing your ego over real change.
Your defensiveness is not neutral
When you tense up at critique, when you rush to explain, when you hijack the conversation to narrate your intention, when you say, “But we’re doing our best,” or “That wasn’t the goal,” or “You misunderstood,” or “That’s not a fair accusation,” you are not just reacting emotionally. You are engaging in a form of control. You are reasserting your narrative as more legitimate than mine. You are reminding the room whose version of the story has institutional weight.
This is ego. It is self-preservation disguised as neutrality.
And it has no place in accessibility.
I have no legacy to protect—only systems to fix
Perhaps it’s because I’m autistic, or perhaps because I’ve lived through enough grief that pride feels like a ridiculous currency, but I have never seen value in reputation maintenance. I am not here to polish my record. I am not interested in whether people admire me. I want to know whether systems work. I want to know whether people are safe. I want to know whether students with multiple marginalisations can walk into your building and feel like they belong without shrinking themselves to fit inside it.
I will say what is broken. I will name it in the plainest language I have. I will do this even if I was the one who built it. I have designed inaccessible tools. I have used platforms that excluded people. I have misread what someone needed. I have centred my process over someone else’s capacity. And when I find that flaw, I do not collapse. I correct it.
This is not weakness. This is leadership.
Let the idea win, not the author
In collaborative spaces, especially those tasked with changing unjust systems, the most powerful practice we can adopt is the principle that no one owns the idea that saves us. Let the best idea win—not the person with the highest salary or the most charisma or the cleanest HR file. Let the strategy emerge from the margins. Let the language evolve from listening. Let the process be rewritten by those who could not enter the old one.
When ego is suspended—when identity is de-centred—accessibility becomes collective. No longer performance, but movement. No longer a reflection of your personal virtue, but a shared commitment to a future in which fewer people are harmed.
This is what change requires.
And this is what you owe.
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.
