My job wasn't to have all the answers. It was to ask the questions that mattered.

From Checkbox to Culture

The session opened with a provocation: Accessibility is often framed as compliance. What does it mean to move beyond compliance into truly empowering product design?

What emerged wasn't just a technical conversation about WCAG guidelines or screen reader compatibility. Dee and Roderick both pushed back on the idea that accessibility is something you add at the end - a feature, a nice-to-have, a legal requirement. They framed it as the foundation of product equity: if you're not designing for the full spectrum of human ability, you're not designing well. Period.

The Questions That Landed

Some moments stay with you. When I asked "What are some common misconceptions teams have about accessibility that need to be challenged?" - the answers cut deep. The assumption that disabled users are edge cases. The belief that accessible design is inherently less beautiful or functional. The notion that centering disabled users somehow compromises the experience for everyone else.

Roderick shared examples from Bank of America's work where designing for accessibility actually improved usability for all users - larger touch targets, clearer navigation hierarchies, better contrast ratios. Dee talked about Adobe's Product Equity Team embedding themselves in communities, not just running usability tests but building relationships with disabled creators who use their tools professionally.

The through-line: meaningful inclusion requires proximity. You can't design for people you've never spent time with, whose lived experiences remain abstract to you.

AI, Voice, and What's Next

The conversation got particularly interesting when we moved into emerging technologies. I asked: "We often think about accessibility in terms of screens and text, but as we move into experiences powered by voice, AI, and spatial design, the definition starts to shift. How should we be rethinking accessibility for these new modalities?"

This is where things got uncomfortable - in a good way. AI has the potential to be radically empowering: real-time captioning, visual description, adaptive interfaces that learn individual needs. But it also has the potential to encode existing biases at scale, to optimize for the average user while leaving disabled communities behind, to move so fast that accessibility becomes an afterthought yet again.

Dee and Roderick both emphasized the same solution: include disabled users in the innovation process from the beginning. Not as test subjects. As co-creators.

Why This Conversation Mattered at AfroTech

Here's what struck me: AfroTech is a space where Black technologists are asking who gets to build the future? A panel on accessibility fit perfectly into that question. Because exclusion compounds. When you're already underrepresented in tech, and you're also disabled, the barriers multiply.

Product equity means building tools that serve all of us, not just the users who fit neatly into product team assumptions. That requires agency, not just representation.

What I'm Taking Forward

As a UX Design Manager at Google Photos, I work on creative expression tools used by billions of people. After moderating this panel, I'm asking myself harder questions: Who are we leaving out? What assumptions are baked into our definition of "creative expression"? How do we center users whose needs we might not immediately understand?

The work centers on dignity. We're either building a future where technology empowers everyone, or we're building one that doesn't empower anyone at all.