On far gone conclusions and participating in a school district’s accessibility committee

You called it collaboration. We recognised the smell of extraction.

---

The invitation: dressed in equity, padded with keywords

You summoned us to assist. You issued invitations laced with keywords—barriers, co-design, lived experience, equity—an enticing academic dialect for what turned out to be unpaid policy laundering in a branded container.

You framed it as collaboration, spoke solemnly of us shaping future policy, insisted that our knowledge was essential. You described this assembly as inclusive, generative, shared.

---

Pre-decided structures masquerading as shared design

Ownership was clearly assigned in advance, demarcated in agenda formatting, interface choice, speaker hierarchy, and structural assumptions so calcified they resisted even the mildest inquiry. You built it without us.

The design was settled before the first mouse click. The tools selected without consultation. The meeting format approved. The institutional representatives positioned. The expectations communicated through inference and omission.

---

An architecture of polish, pace, and institutional comfort

Every element—interface, timeline, facilitation script, feedback mechanism—was engineered for speed, coherence, and reputational insulation, with no apparent effort to accommodate the disruptive presence of those for whom the harm had been enduring and corporeal.

You created a room optimised for brisk civility, verbal discipline, and performative consensus, with no functional capacity to hold grief, pattern recognition, historical memory, or the rage that comes from enduring systems that operate without consequence.

---

The ask: stories, urgency, clarity—minus disruption

You requested stories but provided no infrastructure for their receipt. You requested vulnerability but furnished no container for its aftermath. You requested input but retained total control over its format, interpretation, and final deployment.

You responded to trauma disclosures with professional nodding and text boxes. You closed the meeting on the hour. You smiled as the session expired and called it success, measured in character count and emoji response.

---

The recoil: a reflexive defense of institutional fragility

You professed surprise at our tone, astonishment at our volume, confusion at our refusal to sanitise. You did not prepare for the pattern recognition that emerges when people have spent a decade watching their children and friends get eaten by the system.

You recoiled when we spoke plainly. You blinked when we named the violence. You tilted your heads when we named the fact that staff in the room had harmed us.

---

A sandbox of friction, formatted as consultation

The platforms you selected required visual fluency, executive functioning, rapid processing, and a complete detachment from the reality of assistive tech users. The process prised polish over pacing, speed over comprehension, structure over accessibility.

The facilitation relied on optimism and slide transitions to compensate for the absence of structural readiness. The emotional and cognitive labour demanded by the process exceeded any reasonable standard of consent.

---

Participation as performance: the aftermath of endurance

You called it participation. We called it endurance. You described it as collaborative design. We experienced it as hostile architecture. You thanked us for our insights. We left overstimulated, dysregulated, and gaslit—again.

This is the chronicle of your Accessibility committee. It is a record of your structure, your power, your decision to convene harm survivors without sufficient training, transparency, or infrastructure to process what that survival might sound like.

---

What we recognised beneath the branding

It is a case study in extraction under the guise of engagement. It is a demonstration of how participation becomes performance when institutions confuse platform access with power redistribution. It is the story of how you asked for help, then flinched when we delivered it.

You selected the container. You defined the terms. You awarded yourself the right to narrate our presence. And when we resisted the formatting, you edited us out.

---

What remains: the essays you did not commission

Over the following weeks, I wrote a series of essays—each a sharpened fragment from inside your process. I’m just sharing a few of them here, to protect the privacy of individuals who participated. Not the institution, they don’t deserve my protection.

• We must start with an acknowledgement of harm
• Ego has no place in accessibility
• I am just me: What it costs to show up
• Don’t wait until the lawsuits
• On teachers, trust, and the long unravelling of support
• Introductions are an access issue
• How I learned to go first
• What collaboration really means
• Barriers in the process mirror the barriers we named

---

You called it consultation. I called it a record.

I entered this committee with the intention to contribute. I imagined a space of co-construction. I brought tools, analysis, and memory. And when the process repeated the very injuries it claimed to dismantle, I brought something else: recordkeeping.

Because someone must. I have no idea what will happen to the thousand stickies I posted on your PowerPoint presentation despite the fact it kept glitching because you didn’t choose a software that was meant for collaboration.