Through a Different Lens: What If I’ve Been Defining My Career Wrong?

A realization caught me completely off guard recently.

For years, if someone asked what I was passionate about, my answer came easily: accessibility.

It made perfect sense. I lead creative at a company focused on digital accessibility. I speak about inclusive design. I host conversations about disability, technology, and the future of design. Accessibility has become the lens through which many people know my work.

So it surprised me when I realized that answer no longer felt quite right.

Not because I care any less about accessibility, I probably care more now than I ever have... but because I realized I had been answering a different question. I had been describing the field I work in rather than the thing that has driven me throughout my career.

When I look back over twenty-five years, the common thread isn’t accessibility. It’s the pursuit of exceptional experiences.

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Long before accessibility became part of my job, I was obsessed with understanding why some products felt effortless while others felt frustrating. Why some experiences created delight while others created friction. Whether I was working in fashion, retail, technology, or digital innovation, I was always asking the same question: How do we make this better for the people using it?

My understanding of what “better” means has changed dramatically over the years.

Being diagnosed as neurodivergent helped me understand why I notice patterns, inconsistencies, and assumptions that other people often overlook. Later, Ramsay Hunt syndrome profoundly changed my relationship with disability. Combined with recognizing that I had been living with conditions like Ehlers-Danlos syndrome all along, those experiences didn’t change what fascinated me about design. They changed the lens through which I evaluated it.

They changed the standard by which I judged whether design was actually good.

Today, I don’t think an experience can be called exceptional if whole groups of people are excluded from participating in it. That realization has made me think differently about how we talk about accessibility as an industry.

Too often, accessibility is introduced through the language of compliance. We talk about audits, lawsuits, standards, procurement requirements, and risk. Those conversations are important. They create accountability, protect people’s rights, and have pushed organizations to improve in meaningful ways. But I don’t think they’re the conversations that inspire great creative work.

Nobody becomes a designer because they’re excited to pass an audit. We become designers because we want to create products, services, and experiences that people genuinely love—things that solve problems elegantly, earn trust, and feel almost invisible because they work so well.

To me, accessibility isn’t separate from that ambition. It is one of the clearest indicators that we’ve achieved it.

The inclusive products I admire most aren’t memorable simply because they’re accessible. They’re memorable because someone was willing to question assumptions everyone else accepted. They began by considering people who had been overlooked, and the result wasn’t merely a more accessible experience. It was a better one.

That’s why I no longer think accessibility is my passion. Exceptional design is, and it always has been.

Accessibility is one of the highest standards I use to evaluate whether I’ve achieved it.

Maybe that’s a subtle distinction. Maybe it’s just semantics. Or maybe it changes the conversation entirely.

Sometimes the most important shift isn’t changing the work itself. It’s stepping back, looking again, and realizing you’ve been viewing it through the wrong frame.

If we continue positioning accessibility primarily as compliance, we’ll continue attracting organizations that see it as an obligation. But if we begin talking about accessibility as one of the defining characteristics of exceptional design, perhaps we stop asking, “How accessible does this need to be?”

And start asking a much more interesting question:

How good could this be if we designed it for more people from the very beginning?

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