Leading with Kindness: Building an Accessibility Culture through a Pedagogy of Kindness

What if the missing ingredient in your accessibility work is not a policy, platform, or procedure, but a pedagogy? This session draws on Cate Denial’s Pedagogy of Kindness to reframe accessibility as a relational and structural practice rooted in believing people and believing in them. Kindness is not softness, but a deliberate commitment to seeing and supporting people, shaping how higher education IT organizations design services, respond to accommodation requests, and build sustainable team cultures.We begin with a familiar starting point: accessibility work that is reactive, siloed, and compliance-driven. From there, we trace a transformation that began in March 2025, showing how a shift in mindset led to scalable change across policy and process, team culture, and measurable outcomes. Participants will explore how Universal Design supports proactive access and examine the critical distinction between kindness and niceness—naming inaccessibility rather than overlooking it. Attendees will leave with a practical framework to redesign one process, redistribute accessibility work beyond a single team, and remove one barrier in their own context.