I've got a confession to make. The work I most look forward to at the moment isn't strategy or accessibility. It's a children's picture book I'm working on self-publishing. It's also, unexpectedly, teaching me new lessons in inclusive design. A picture book is arguably more image than words, and an audience that will not politely pretend to be engaged. Plus, once it's out there, it's kind of hard to release a fix or an update. 😅 Respect your audience. Don't over-explain. Let the medium do its share of the work. Sound familiar? I sometimes think the things we do purely for joy end up teaching us more than the things we do to get better. So... what's yours? The thing outside work that has quietly made you better at work. I'd love to know.

We often assume the person blocking us needs more information. So we build a better deck, find one more statistic, rehearse a sharper case. But most people who've decided something isn't a priority aren't under-informed. They're protecting something — a deadline, a budget, a promise they've already made to someone upstairs. More information doesn't move them, because information was never the obstacle. What I've found works better: before making your case, ask one question. "What would this need to not put at risk for you?" It changes the conversation from you versus them to both of you versus the problem. Sometimes the answer tells you exactly how to shape your proposal. Sometimes it tells you this isn't the moment, which is also worth knowing before you spend your credibility. Try it this week and report back. I want to hear what the immovable people in your world are protecting.

Tell us about a piece of work you're still proud of that nobody really noticed. Not the award-winners. The quiet ones. The flow you untangled that stopped a hundred support calls no one ever traced back to you. The wording you fought for that finally made something make sense. We often assume good work speaks for itself. It doesn't. It usually whispers, and it's often whispering to an empty room. So this is the room. Brag quietly below. I promise I'll cheer for you.

Next time you need someone to care about a fix, try swapping the compliance version for this. Instead of: "This isn't accessible." Try: "Right now, someone can't finish this because [specific real thing that breaks for them]. Here's what fixing it means for them, and for us." The formula: name the person, not the rule. Name the impact, not the standard. Try it once over the next week, in a meeting or a message. Come back and tell me what happened when you did.

I started collecting a particular kind of story. Someone using a chatbot to untangle a dense policy document they’d been avoiding for weeks. Someone dictating their ideas because typing was the thing standing between them and starting. Someone asking AI to summarise a meeting they couldn’t follow in real time. None of these tools were designed as assistive technology. Nobody signed anything off. And yet, quietly, that’s what they’ve become for a lot of people. I call it accidental AT. Mainstream tools doing access work nobody planned. I find it fascinating and slightly unsettling in equal measure. Fascinating, because inclusion is arriving through the back door, no business case in sight. Unsettling, because what arrives by accident can disappear by accident too — one redesign, one pricing change, and someone’s workaround is gone. Have you seen this anywhere? A tool doing quiet access work it was never built for, whether for a user, a colleague, or you. I really am collecting these, so please tell me.