I navigate the world with a disability, so I have spent a long time on the receiving end of software that was finished before anyone asked whether I could use it. That is not usually malice. It is sequencing: accessibility gets scheduled after the thing works, which means it gets scheduled after every decision that determines whether it can work for me has already been made.

The lesson I took from it is narrower and more useful than a slogan. If a property has to hold, it has to be enforced by something that runs whether or not anyone remembers it — a test, a check, a gate in the pipeline. Anything that depends on someone being conscientious at the right moment will hold right up until the week it matters.

That is the same instinct I bring to the infrastructure work. The pipelines I build treat a model's output as a proposal and let a deterministic cascade decide what actually ships, because the alternative is trusting that nothing will go wrong in exactly the way you did not think to check. Being the person a system quietly failed is a decent education in not building systems that fail quietly.

None of this makes the work I do accessibility work — it is not, and I would not claim it. It just means I do not think of "does this work for people unlike me" as a phase that comes later, because I have been the person it came later for.