I can’t believe it’s been almost two months since Emma Wilson FRSA and I were in Tokyo for Valuable 500‘s SYNC25 conference (and then my husband and I grabbed two days either side as holiday (as it’s always been on his bucket list). It was such an incredible trip and it was a privilege to attend, both in my role with Sara Weller CBE for ActionAble and as a new supplier to the much loved Valuable 500 team. Literally any related meeting I get asks me what was it like? Who did you meet? Did you love Tokyo? So much so, I felt this article may be of interest and I wanted to create some form of digital record of it to look back on.
From the opening session it felt different – Katy Talikowska CEO of The Valuable 500, named that energy instantly and didn’t dilute it. Katy reminded everyone that the people in the room had arrived “not because it was easy. Not because the timing was ideal. But because you understand that true leadership means being present. Especially when it’s hardest. And that, really, was the emotional tone of the entire session: this isn’t a moment, it’s a movement. Leaders showing up when the timing isn’t ideal, the pressure is real, and the world feels like, well… a lot!
I appreciated Katy moving so quickly from the personal to the systemic – she framed SYNC25 as a shift away from disconnected efforts and towards synchronised collective action, where we “move beyond isolated efforts and unlock the multiplier effect of moving forward together.”
Jeff Dodds, CEO of Formula E and Chair of The Valuable 500 Foundation, then took that baton and made the standard even sharper. His whole message was essentially: enjoy the next two days, but don’t confuse talking with change and a reminder that this has to be about “deeds not words.” Then he underlined the point with what felt like the real assignment for everyone in the room: “after tomorrow… we turn the moment into a movement.”
Paul Polman brought the biggest context. Emma, being a life-long fan, was listening so intently. I must admit I was also intrigued to see the person in real life – someone who’d had such a big role in designing the SDGs. Like, wow! As former CEO of Unilever and now Chair of The Valuable 500 Advisory Board, he spoke with the calm authority of someone who has seen how quickly bold promises can unravel when the world gets messy.
“The real obstacles today… are not technical. They’re institutional, they’re cultural, and they’re often in our own minds.” That quote really stuck with me!
Dr. Caroline Casey, founder of The Valuable 500, brought the fire and the heart in buckets. She talked about collaboration, collective action, and the constant pressure to fracture into silos or ego, especially when times are tense. Her call was direct: “lay down your swords. Will you lay down your egos?” because the movement doesn’t survive if people get pulled apart. She anchored it in what actually moves people: authenticity. “Back it up with data, but don’t you ever leave your heart outside the room.” That line hit me hard and I’ve used it several times since! She closed with something that felt like both a message and a mandate for the next decade: “have a soft front. Have a strong back… have a wild heart for ambition.” It was emotional, yes, but it was also practical. Soft front doesn’t mean weak. Strong back doesn’t mean hard. Wild heart doesn’t mean chaos. It means ambition with humanity; resilience with purpose.
And then Ichiro Kabasawa , Executive Director of The Nippon Foundation, brought the whole session back down to earth in the best way. He spoke as a co-host, but also as someone representing decades of work supporting disabled people’s participation in society, in Japan and globally. His point was incredibly clear: employment is one of the most direct routes to participation, agency, and power and that’s fundamentally why business matters. “If companies change, society changes,” he said, stripping away any lingering idea that disability inclusion is corporate charity. It’s infrastructure. It’s access. It’s freedom. It’s the way people earn, contribute, consume, pay taxes, and gain a voice.
The opening session certainly set a high bar!!
Session two was where SYNC25 shifted from the rallying cry to the real-world mechanics of leadership. The title was “Leading with purpose: C-suite perspectives on disability inclusion” A group of senior leaders talking about what inclusive leadership looks like when you’re the one signing off strategy, budgets, buildings, products, and culture.
Paul talked about the power of the Valuable 500 as a collective, not a club, and how benchmarking is where the truth comes out. He threw out the numbers that should stop any boardroom in its tracks, including the spending power “about 18 trillion if you include family and friends” and that “only 3% of C-suite leaders with disabilities would actually disclose.”
Then Moriaki Kida, Chairperson and CEO of EY Japan, answered Paul’s question about his ‘aha’ moment in a way I didn’t expect at all, and couldn’t stop thinking about afterwards. He shared that his first real encounter with the word “disability” came almost 40 years ago, when he was coming out as a gay man and searching library shelves for language to describe what he was feeling.
Kristine Decker, Chief Equality and Inclusion Officer at Procter & Gamble, brought a different kind of energy, bright and determined (literally, she described wearing a green blazer because “green means go and we have to keep going.”) I loved that as it reminded me of our green heart at ImpactMatch. We’re definitely the “Go” impact kind of partner. Her thread was that inclusion isn’t a separate programme, it’s the way you build better business. Something which was the key take away from our Financial Services roundtable too.
Bob Willen, Global Managing Partner and Chairman of Kearney, a leading global management consulting firm, then talked about disability inclusion as something “intrinsically connected to humanity” and highlighted this is long-term work that transcends whatever is flaring up politically at any given moment.
Audrey Duval, MD, Executive Vice President at Sanofi and President of Sanofi France, talked about learning through mentorship: regular calls with a mentee who has a visible disability, and who is “very generous in sharing where she’s struggling”. Audrey described those conversations as emotional, full of naïve questions, and ending with a consistent prompt: “What about others?”
Phil Witherington, President and CEO of Manulife, Canada’s largest insurance company, brought the operating model lens: how do you take purpose and make it live across a global organisation without it becoming a poster? His answer was both simple and quite radical in its order of priorities. He said that when he describes Manulife now, he leads with the stakeholder bit first, not as a footnote after shareholders and then he went deeper on what sustains psychological safety: values you can actually use when decisions get tough. He shared an example of when he was faced with the choice of buying or renting a regional HQ in Hong Kong, the team at Manulife stepped back and asked what an inclusive outcome would actually require. The answer wasn’t either option. “The answer was building.” So, they designed their own accessible space and ended up with a Disability Inclusion award for the new Manulife Tower.
Paul shared his own version of that wake-up call at Unilever, when a visually impaired friend came back with three pages of barriers that made it “just impossible” to even apply to the company.
Governor Koike shared her welcome address next – Japan’s first female Minister of Defence and Tokyo’s first female governor and how “It is an honour for Tokyo to have been selected as the inaugural site of this meaningful summit on the important topic of disability inclusion.”
What I loved most was that she didn’t stay in the abstract. She gave specific examples of what this looks like in Tokyo, right now. She talked about the “pretty” robots in the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, remotely operated by people with severe disabilities who find it difficult to leave home, providing visitor services from a distance. She also spoke about expanding work opportunities through social firms, and even building a legal backbone for it.
“How storytelling empowers leaders of tomorrow” came next with Katy Talikowska in conversation with Karyn Twaronite, EY’s Global Vice Chair of Inclusiveness.
Katy opened by thanking the previous panel then she did a very Katy thing: made it warm, and made it slightly funny. She acknowledged & reminded everyone that EY has been in this movement from the very start, one of Valuable 500’s original founding companies. I thought Emma Mitchell would have loved to hear that!
Karyn was brilliant. She introduced herself then she went deep quickly and shared something about the history of EY: their founder, Arthur Young, was sight-impaired and deaf. She told the story of how an accident forced him to innovate, become an entrepreneur, and start again, which became the foundation of a firm that now employs over 400,000 people in 150 countries. That was the first reminder of the session: disability has always been part of leadership and innovation – we just don’t always choose to tell that story out loud.
“Stories are 22 times more memorable than facts.” And even with all our technology, people are lonelier than ever. Exclusion rates are rising. “85% of global workers have felt excluded at work,” she said, up 10% since their last study. For disabled people, visible and non-visible, it’s even higher. Belonging is the condition for people doing their best work so the fact it’s getting worse should be setting off alarm bells in every leadership team.
EY’s storytelling work “is really not intended to be an advertising campaign or any type of promotional activity,” she said. “We did it for our people… authentically in their own words.” Not scripted. Not polished into HR-approved perfection. Just colleagues choosing to raise their hand and tell the truth and more people tuned into those stories than all their other accountability initiatives.
Katy then brought the conversation back to the statistic Paul shared earlier, the one that had been hanging in the air all day: only 3% of C-suite leaders disclose a disability and she asked what I think a lot of us were wondering too: how do you use storytelling to activate senior sponsorship, especially when leaders either don’t have lived experience or don’t feel safe enough to share it?
Karyn answered by showing the stories:
- First was Chandni, a visually impaired colleague, who talked about being given less work early in her career, not because she lacked ability but because people assumed she did. “It was quite frustrating, because I wanted to be treated like everybody else…My life is all about finding solutions.”
- Then came Mike’s video, a partner in EY’s UK audit business, talking about dyslexia and the invisible effort of coping mechanisms. His story was packed with leadership truth, especially when he said: “If I don’t talk about it as somebody who’s in a leadership position, nobody else is going to do it.” That resonated with me personally, being a fellow dyslexic because I do think it is so important to talk about these things! “I don’t have all the right answers, and actually the right outcome comes from people contributing and taking different views.”
Karyn shared that after profiling senior leaders too, “my phone has been ringing off the hook” with people wanting to share their stories. She also made a point about symbols, which I didn’t expect but totally agree with: She said she’s carried Braille business cards for 15 years and people often ask why, especially if they don’t think there are blind colleagues around “most importantly, it actually encourages a dialogue.”
Sarah Clements (Director of Engagement at The Valuable 500) hosted with warmth and precision, welcoming Gonzalo M. Gonzales from Springer Nature. A UX researcher from Peru living in Mexico City, Gonzalo spoke candidly about being autistic and having ADHD, being diagnosed at 34, and growing up feeling like everyone else could connect effortlessly while he was left asking, “What’s wrong with me?”
Through Generation Valuable, his view of leadership shifted from hierarchy and authority to authenticity and safety, describing how his mentoring relationship helped him stop masking, become more open, and bring that learning back into his work: “people will know who I am. And I know who I am now.”
He talked about a joyful Tokyo example, linking Pokémon’s global success to its autistic creator, Satoshi Tajiri, and a mentorship relationship that helped his idea get supported rather than rejected – which was news to me, I didn’t know Satoshi Tajiri was autistic!
I really enjoyed Dr Shani Dhanda‘s session because she was so direct about the gap between promises and lived reality, “Progress has not always matched people’s promises,” and also that progress isn’t a neat upward graph, she said. “Progress is human. It’s lived, and it’s felt.”
My favourite quote from her was “Disability is actually what we do to one another. Through barriers and biases.” And if that’s true, then leaders can’t pretend it’s out of their hands, because bias is something we can control. She called accessibility “the front door to inclusion” and said it “cannot be an afterthought”, because if people can’t access what we design, sell, hire for, or communicate, then we aren’t being inclusive, even if we’re well-meaning. She pushed it further by saying if inclusion isn’t intersectional, we may as well not bother, because it becomes dangerous and leaves even more people behind. Every decision we make raises or lowers barriers to participation, and choosing not to act is still a decision. Her closing question landed like a direct challenge: what action will you take?
The “Nothing Without Us” panel started with a punch. Before anyone spoke, we watched CoorDown’s World Down Syndrome Day campaign and it was impossible not to feel it in your chest: As Cara Yar Khan said afterwards, this is what authentic representation looks like when disabled people aren’t just the subject of a story, but leading the storytelling process itself.
Palesa Mosiea moderated the panel and named the gap with key stats – disabled people are around 18% of the global population, yet only 1% of advertising represents them and even within that, most feel misrepresented. Her message was simple: representation isn’t a brand moment, it’s power and it’s money and it’s dignity, all at once.
The panel itself was a practical masterclass in “how”, not just “why”. Giles Barker BEM from Channel 4 (who shared he’s living with multiple health conditions) talked about their disability code of portrayal and the principle that mattered most: give disabled people agency and voice, show disabled characters in three dimensions, and build campaigns through co-creation rather than assumption. Martina Fuga, President of CoorDown and mum to a young woman with Down syndrome, gave the sharpest rule of the day: “disabled people must be involved before the creative idea exists, not after.” Not as validators. As shapers, from the brief onwards. Isaac Zablocki from ReelAbilities International backed that up from the film world, saying talent is absolutely out there and the excuse doesn’t wash anymore, plus his answer to the “but what about the biggest star?” argument was brutally fair: how does a disabled actor ever become the next Tom Cruise if they’re never cast?
And then Sam Latif from P&G landed it with accessibility as the business case because if advertising isn’t built with audio description and captioning, he argued, you are simply not reaching huge audiences. He shared why Casino Royale mattered to him personally: it was the first Bond film he could properly follow because it had audio description.
A video of Pam Mangat, Head of Creative at BBC StoryWorks, introducing “All In” as a new series made for The Valuable 500 came next, grounded in what their audience data keeps showing: disability inclusion content holds attention, gets shared, and lands because it’s relevant and urgent right now.
The trailer was great. Framed as a letter, voiced by Palesa Mosia and Dr Shani Dhanda, it opened with the line: “Being disabled isn’t the problem. An inaccessible world is.” Palesa’s voice carried that mix of warmth and steel, naming disability as the one identity any of us can enter at any time.
That was the end of the morning session and we disappeared outside to enjoy some light refreshment and to chat to people from all over the world before coming back for the afternoon.
Michael Aumann, CEO and Co-Founder of myAbility Social Enterprise introduced myAbility as a global social enterprise based in Austria, working with organisations to remove barriers through employment, training and consulting, and then cut right to the recurring problem he sees everywhere: most companies want to do the right thing, but they have no data, no benchmark, and no way of knowing if they’re improving or just performing. His central argument was simple, and honestly a bit devastating in its logic: inclusion doesn’t succeed through intention, it succeeds through structure. When you anchor disability inclusion strategically, you get results, and when you don’t, you drift.
The statistic that landed hardest was the gap myAbility sees in its own research: organisations that have strategically anchored disability inclusion average an inclusion score of 73%, versus an overall average of 44%. What separates the high scorers wasn’t “good culture” in the abstract, it was very operational: clear goals, clear KPIs, and clear accountability. Michael framed it in a line I’ll remember because it’s so usable:
“compliance tells you what you must report, strategy explains why you do it, and leadership is how you make it matter.”
He warned against treating disability inclusion as a single-number exercise, especially representation, because headcount alone can lie. You can have a high number of disabled employees and still not be an inclusive organisation, depending on the work, the conditions, and whether people actually have power. Instead, he offered a more complete reporting framework: track representation at senior levels, track accessibility measures and adjustments, track awareness and training impact (not just attendance), track HR and recruiting practices, and track what resources and sponsorship your employee networks actually have. If you can measure it, you can manage it, and if you make it visible, leaders can no longer pretend it’s “handled somewhere else.”
Next came Sara Weller CBE, non-executive chair and FTSE 100 director, and my co-founder of ActionAble – with a long and celebrated business career behind her, Sara is one of the very few people who can speak about disability inclusion from both the boardroom and lived experience. She opened with a statistic – that across roughly 1,000 FTSE 100 board roles, around 450 are held by women, about 190 by x , and one by someone with a declared disability. Hers. She acknowledged the applause, but reframed it quickly as responsibility.
“Disability inclusion, she argued, has been understood for years. What’s been missing is action, not awareness.”
She traced that urgency back to her own turning point. At 47, while running the UK’s largest non-food retailer, she was diagnosed with progressive multiple sclerosis. Overnight, her sense of purpose had to be rewritten. What followed was not a story of diminished leadership, but the opposite. Sara spoke candidly about becoming a better leader, more empathetic, more creative, more solutions-driven, precisely because she now had to navigate a world not designed for her. For Sara, the business case is not theoretical – if you ignore disability inclusion, you ignore around a quarter of your customers and a huge amount of talent. “That, she said bluntly, is not values-led leadership, it’s just bad business.”
ActionAble was born out of frustration with excuses she kept hearing at senior levels. “We’re busy focusing on gender and race,” or worse, “Our disclosure is too low.” Her rebuttal was sharp and clear: disclosure is an output, not an input. People don’t share what they don’t trust you to handle well. If disclosure is low, the question isn’t what’s wrong with employees, it’s what’s wrong with leadership. ActionAble was a deliberately practical intervention with Sixty-four speakers, sixty-four actions. Hundreds of organisations leaving with concrete plans and the impact work that followed distilled this into three simple priorities, the three Rs: report openly, recruit inclusively, and respect lived experience.
Sara closed with a direct challenge to boards. Public commitment matters. Write it down. Say it out loud. Put disability in your annual report. Fix recruitment so adjustments are in place before day one. Elevate employee voice, especially lived experience, to board level. Not all at once, not perfectly, but visibly and deliberately. Progress, not perfection. Her final ask was simple and uncomfortable in the right way: stop talking about commitment and start proving it. By the end of SYNC25, choose one concrete action and take it. That, she made clear, is what leadership looks like now.
Paul Polman then moved the conversation away from frameworks and towards something more intimate: The “quiet, invisible decisions that leaders have to make”, the moments that never make it into a strategy deck but decide whether inclusion is real or merely aspirational. He called it the difference between “the architecture of inclusion” and “the inner wiring of inclusion”. Newly appointed Global Chair of Baker McKenzie, Sunny Mann, was an apt partner for that exploration. With a career shaped by being from an ethnic minority, openly gay, and now leading a global firm of nearly 15,000 people, Sunny spoke openly about what drives him, returning again and again to fairness.
“No single demographic has a monopoly on talent,” he said, adding that leadership is fundamentally about “giving everyone a fair shot at life and allowing them to demonstrate what they’re capable of.” His commitment to disability inclusion, he shared, came through a moment of realisation about allyship. After years of asking others to show up as allies for ethnicity and LGBTQ+ inclusion, someone with a disability said to him, “Yes, Sunny, I’m all in.” “That’s when the penny dropped,” he reflected. “I needed to be an ally to other communities as well.” Later, reflecting on disclosure, his words landed hard: “I know what it’s like to be in the closet. It pains me that there are people with disabilities who don’t trust their leadership enough to be open.” Low declaration rates, he said, are not a data problem but a trust problem, and one he now feels personally responsible for addressing.
As the conversation turned to leadership under pressure, Paul Polman challenged Sunny on how inclusion survives in a world of short tenures, geopolitical instability and constant urgency. Sunny was clear that this work cannot be parked. “Our strongest asset is our people,” he said, “but that only works if those people can truly be themselves.” He shared that he had deliberately kept inclusion within his own Chair portfolio, explaining, “I want to show I’m committed to our talent base.” Asked about hope, Sunny returned to a concept from his Punjabi Sikh upbringing, chardi kala, meaning optimism and resilience because
“It shouldn’t be just about business legacy. It should also be about humanity. Why shouldn’t it be both?”
Sitting with David Carrigan from Sky and Margaret Johnston-Clarke from L’Oréal, Caroline Casey made it clear this was about what actually makes inclusion stick when things get uncomfortable. Both organisations have done something rare: they’ve embedded independent DEI advisory councils that sit close to power, challenge leadership directly, and refuse to let inclusion be managed as a reputational risk rather than a business responsibility.
Margaret spoke about why L’Oréal created its board during Covid, deliberately building a structure that brought external expertise, lived experience and the executive committee into the same room. That work exposed a familiar pattern: anonymous self-ID far higher than formal declaration, signalling a trust gap rather than a data gap. Her response was practical and human: country-by-country action plans, leadership-led storytelling, and campaigns like Break the Silence so people could hear themselves reflected in others before choosing to disclose. Inclusion, she said, only moves when people feel safe, seen and personally invested.
David then took the conversation straight into the hardest operational terrain: workplace adjustments. “We don’t ask people to prove they have a disability.” Today, adjustments are delivered within around 21 days, reported to the CEO, and supported by just-in-time learning that reduces fear for managers before conversations even start. The message from all three was consistent and unapologetic: inclusive work doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when leaders choose bravery over comfort, design over goodwill, and accountability over silence.
Sam Latif opened with a question that stayed with me: do you see accessibility as “an integral part of your engine for growth, or a trailer you need to drag behind you?” At Procter & Gamble, she said, the answer became clear when they stopped seeing disability as niche and started seeing it as mainstream reality. Her own story made that unavoidable – becoming blind at 16, wanting what she described as “an ordinary life”, and then navigating a world “not set up for me” because only one in four blind people of working age are employed, even 25 years later.
Sam talked about initiating a disability challenge that asked senior leaders, right up to the CEO, to experience everyday barriers first-hand. Wearing gloves to simulate reduced dexterity. Glasses to simulate sight loss. Being asked simply: can you open this product, can you tell these bottles apart? “And in that struggle, they understand.” That empathy unlocked innovation. From tactile symbols on shampoo bottles to NaviLens codes that read product information aloud and guide shoppers through stores, inclusive design stopped being about special cases and became about better products for everyone. Less than 10% of blind people read Braille, but 100% of people benefit from intuitive design.
She spoke of how P&G went from under 10% accessible websites to 94%, meaning 15 million more people could actually use them. Audio description and captions weren’t framed as nice-to-haves, but as ways of opening advertising to “an additional 250 million consumers”. And underpinning it all was talent. Sam was clear that inclusive design only works when disabled people are part of the workforce shaping it.
Closing SYNC25 with Apple felt like a real values conversation about what it really means when accessibility isn’t a programme, a policy, or a response to pressure, but part of a company’s DNA.
Caroline Casey made that explicit early on. Accessibility at Apple, she said, isn’t something you add to products – it’s something you design into everything. Sitting opposite her, Sarah Herrlinger completely embodied that. 22 years into her Apple career, she didn’t speak like a figurehead or a spokesperson. She spoke like someone who has been patiently, persistently building something from the inside.
“If I could convince an engineer to do even the simplest of things,” she reflected, “I could change lives.” That conviction has never left her.
Sarah traced her route into accessibility back to Apple’s education work – listening to teachers, sitting in classrooms, and learning directly from students who were excluded not by ability, but by design. What stood out was how little of this was framed as heroic. It was iterative, relational, and grounded in listening. Accessibility at Apple, she explained, is everyone’s job: “We never try to build for. We always try to build with.”
That principle ran through everything from internal product development to global campaigns. When Apple launched its new ‘Not remarkable’ film on International Day of Persons with Disabilities, it wasn’t positioned as a moment of inspiration but as an assertion of normality. “I’m not the same, but I’m not other,” the lyrics declared, co-authored with disabled students themselves.
The joy of the film mattered, but so did the process. Disabled people weren’t just represented. They shaped the narrative from the start.
By the end, it was clear that Apple’s real breakthrough isn’t any single feature or campaign, but the refusal to treat accessibility as exceptional. Whether it was Magnifier for Mac, hearing health through AirPods, or Personal Voice developed with people living with motor neurone disease, Sarah kept returning to the same point: “Accessibility is not compliance. It’s customisation.”
And perhaps the most important line of the session landed almost quietly: “The normalisation of disability as a part of our society.” That, she said, is the work still to be done. Not making disability visible as ‘other’, but designing it in so completely that dignity, participation, and creativity are assumed.
It felt less like a closing and more like a challenge: if accessibility can be a core value at Apple, it can be a core value anywhere.
Day one closed with “The Nothing Without Us Awards” framed explicitly as “part celebration and part accountability”. Léopoldine Huyghues Despointes opened by naming the problem in plain terms: disability has been “almost non existent” in media, and when it has appeared it has too often felt like a “checkbox gesture”, leaving leadership and creative power structures still “seldom” reflective of the full diversity of ability.
She acknowledged that progress is starting to show up – disabled people portrayed “not as backstories or pity-evoking symbols, but as confident, capable, inspiring individuals” living everyday lives. But she didn’t let the room get comfortable, and pushed hard on the gap between scale and visibility: “16% of the world’s population, about 1.3 billion people are disabled. Yet only 1% of the ads feature people… with disabilities.”
Her point was commercial as much as cultural:
“This is a creative blind spot… and a multi-billion dollar commercial opportunity that the industry keeps leaving on the table.”
Zalando’s message reinforced the “no finish line” theme while grounding it in specific progress: adaptive fashion doubled since 2022 to “more than 600 styles” across categories, alongside platform accessibility and multidimensional diversity in campaigns. Then Katy Talikowska made the ceremony personal and deliberately sobering. She told the origin story of her own advertising “awakening” through Maltesers and Channel 4’s Diversity in Advertising awards, including the moment her creative team refused the brief because they were “white, middle-aged men who don’t identify as living with a disability” and didn’t want to fake expertise. The solution was co-creation and lived experience, partnering with Scope and bringing in a strategist who uses a wheelchair, interviewing disabled women about what makes them laugh and cry, and letting those stories drive the work. She followed that with a statistic that cut through the applause: she emailed 62 senior UK advertising executives inviting entries and received “not one reply”, which she read as either distance or, more likely, embarrassment. The implication was clear: the industry’s silence is still louder than its work, which is exactly why the awards exist.
The honourable mentions showed the range of what “authentic representation” can look like when it’s treated as premium creative rather than a special category. Channel 4’s Paralympics spot weaponised humour and flipped pity into physics, dismantling “considering” language with “Considering what?” and a final truth: “Sport doesn’t care about disability.” Apple’s “Heartstrings” centred hearing access as family intimacy, with the simple prompt “John. Listen.” and the emotional payoff of “Haley.” Tennessee’s “Sound Sites” tackled the accessibility of inspiration itself, calling out generic alt text (“River scene graphic”) and using songwriters to describe place through sensation, leading to “over 500 image descriptions” and an open-source guide. The winner, Currys’ “Sigh of Relief”, made accommodations funny and mainstream, turning the moment of being understood into a literal gust of relief in-store, with the line that captured the whole intent: “Amazing tech for everyone.” Christine Hemphill accepted and named what made it work: humour without apologising for disability, but with “an authentic experience” at the centre, and the reality that co-creation is messy: “The more people you bring into the tent, the more challenging some of the negotiations… but the better the work is that comes out of it.” She also delivered the commercial proof point leaders always ask for: “this ad is now the most successful ad that has ever been commercially for Currys.”
The Changemaker of the Year award then shifted the spotlight from campaigns to systems. Léopoldine framed it as recognising the people “changing how the work is being made”. Josh Loebner won for building the infrastructure of inclusive advertising: leading inclusive design and accessibility at VML, academic depth, industry “firsts”, and pushing disability into decision-making spaces.
Day one was then at a close and I took myself off to meet for dinner with Steven with Em and to catch up with Amy Low CPACC FRSA for some ponders from day 1!
A note of thanks to Em, who was a brilliant thought partner throughout the day. Between sessions (and over dinner), we compared notes, sense-checked our reactions, and helped each other make sense of everything we’d heard. This reflection is richer for those shared conversations, and a truer capture of the day because of them.
