About conor
Disabled design technologist, founder, and CEO. Eighteen years building accessible, equitable digital systems across neuroscience, education, humanitarian data, and enterprise tech — and a career-defining turn that made disability experience a practice, not a personal narrative. Here's how it adds up.
The 18-Year Pattern
From neuroscience labs to EdTech platforms to humanitarian data systems — different sectors, different teams, different stakes. The same gap appeared every time: systems built without genuine consideration for the people who depend on them most. Not as bugs. As structural choices, made by rooms that didn't include the right people. That breadth wasn't accidental — it's what let me see the same pattern across industries that rarely benchmark against each other.
After a career, that pattern isn't an observation. It's a practice foundation.
Education & Career Breadth
The thread starts at Cornish College of the Arts — where design meant understanding people before making anything for them. That instinct sharpened into method at the University of Washington, where I earned a master's in Human Computer Interaction + Design, grounding intuition in research methodology and systems thinking.
Eighteen years across sectors followed: neuroscience research, university education platforms, humanitarian data systems, and enterprise tech — including software engineering at Red Hat. Each domain added a different lens. Research demanded rigor. Humanitarian work demanded radical accessibility under constraint. Enterprise tech demanded systems that scale. None of them had solved the gap.
The Turning Point
In 2020, I was diagnosed with Psoriatic Arthritis. Deep fissures across my palms made sustained keyboard work acutely painful. For eighteen months on disability leave, the question stopped being "when do I go back?" and became "can I go back at all?" I tested every assistive technology I could find. Most fell short of the actual demands of the work.
GitHub Copilot changed that. And with it came a reframe that reorganized everything I thought I knew about what this career could be:
Disabled people build software too. "Nothing about us without us" applies to the builders of digital systems — not just the users.
Nothing About Us Without Us
That reframe isn't a slogan. It's a structural observation with consequences.
Here's what I learned the hard way: the people most excluded from a system are the people best positioned to fix it. That's not inspiration — that's structural truth. When I'm designing something and I can't use it (Psoriatic Arthritis + a mouse-dependent workflow = dead end), that's not my problem to solve alone. That's everyone's problem to solve together. Disability justice and accessibility-first design aren't compliance boxes. They're the scaffolding for systems that actually work for everyone.
A disabled design technologist who becomes a founder and CEO isn't an unusual success story — it's a correction to a longstanding gap. Who builds digital infrastructure is a justice question. When the people most affected by a system's failures are excluded from building it, the failures compound. Disability experience isn't a personal narrative I bring alongside the technical skills. It is a technical skill — one that produces better software, surfaces failure modes early, and builds systems that don't need to be retrofitted for inclusion later.
Accessibility-first design isn't a niche practice for edge cases. It's the standard that makes software legible to everyone — including the users organizations haven't thought to design for yet.
Why AccessiTech
AccessiTech is how all of this becomes work you can hire.
Consulting centers three pillars: Design and Development — Accessible Software as a Product/Service (ASaaPs) for organizations building accessibility from day one; Agentic Intelligence Integration for responsible AI adoption with governance that sticks; and Quality Assurance and Testing to catch barriers before they reach production.
Mentorship is flexible by design. Engagement formats range from 1:1 coaching sessions to multi-day corporate workshops — scope shaped by your team's needs. We work with individuals navigating career transitions and corporate teams building internal accessibility expertise.
Products — WCAG training, open-source tools, and community programs — are free or freemium by intent. Trust is built in public before it's contracted in private.
Each is a different way in. What they share is accountability to the people the system affects.
— conor kelly, founder & CEO