Last week we recorded a new episode of AXSChat with Stephanie Cadieux, Canada’s Chief Accessibility Officer. Debra Ruh, Neil Milliken and I have now spoken with her three times, and each conversation leaves me with a clearer view of why progress on accessibility is so slow.
Stephanie’s job has no direct equivalent anywhere else with the same title and the same independence. She advises the minister responsible for the Accessible Canada Act, monitors progress and reports to parliament every year. The organisations she watches include airlines, banks and telecommunications companies, about six thousand in all. She is one person, so she talks to a sample each year, to people inside and outside government, and to disabled Canadians. In her words, they are the ultimate measure of whether the law works.
One thing she said has stayed with me. If you ask almost anyone in Canada whether accessibility is important, they will say yes. If you ask whether disabled people should have the same rights as everyone else, they will say of course. The agreement is real. The problem appears at the moment of decision, because the frame people use to decide does not include disability. It never enters the process, so nobody rejects it. It simply is not there.
I have spent years around accessibility work, including the four accessibility hackathons in Dublin and many client projects. That description matches what I have seen. The people in the room are rarely hostile. Most of them are busy, and many are afraid. Stephanie said it plainly: people want to be inclusive, but disability frightens them, and they worry about saying the wrong thing and being criticised for it. Her answer is to give them permission to ask questions, to be curious and to get things wrong, as long as they keep moving. I agree with that, and I think it is a more useful message than another warning about legal risk.
Artificial intelligence and the question of choice
Accessibility Standards Canada has published a first standard on accessible artificial intelligence, and the government’s first artificial intelligence strategy references it. It is not a law. Its value is that the question is now on the table while the technology is still being built, and standards usually arrive long after the technology they describe.
Stephanie set two conditions. Disabled people must be included on purpose, because early hiring tools treated them badly. And people must always have a human alternative, because not everyone can or wants to deal with a machine, and an organisation should not make a machine the only route to an answer.
I added a third during the conversation. These tools cost money. If access depends on a subscription, some people cannot even form an opinion about the technology, let alone use it to speak for themselves.
From checklists to accountability
Canada’s first regulations under the Act, covering information and communication technologies, arrive next year. They follow the European standard closely, with minor changes, which helps any company that works in more than one country. Stephanie is now watching how accountability works when several agencies share responsibility. Her hope is to move from technical checklists to responsibility across the whole life of a system, asking whether it is fair, explainable, open to challenge and respectful of disability rights as it changes.
That matters for any organisation building or buying digital products. Passing an audit on launch day tells you very little about a product two years later.
What I take from it
Stephanie describes herself as a one-trick pony who repeats the same message over and over: accessibility is important and it has to happen from the start. She said we cannot assume people heard it last time. After almost thirteen years of making this podcast, I know exactly what she means.
Her closing point was that success in accessibility, whether in buildings, employment or artificial intelligence, comes down to the choices we make. Either we make the right ones or the wrong ones, the easy ones or the ones with the best outcomes. I would add that most of those choices are small, they happen in meetings that nobody records, and they decide more than any regulation does.
Listen to the full episode Full episode on AXSChat, and tell me in the comments which choice your own organisation is facing right now.