GAAD 2026 Fireside Chat: AI, Accessibility, and What It Takes to Get It Right

[E-Illingworth]

To mark Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2026, we brought together Eamon McErlean, VP of Accessibility and Globalization at ServiceNow, with three guests who are doing this work every day: Jesus Santoyo, Senior Director of Enterprise Service Management and AI Automation at Honeywell; Karen Pellegrinelli, Senior Program Manager for Technology Accessibility at the State of Colorado; and Paul van Renselaar, Director at Devoteam and a platform owner who brings his own lived experience with disability to every engagement. The conversation covered AI's role in accessibility, the organizational shifts required to move from compliance to culture, and the misconceptions that still hold teams back. Watch the full recording below and keep reading for the moments that stuck with us.

Five things we heard that we can't stop thinking about:

1. Honeywell went from 5% to 95% WCAG 2.2 AA compliance. Jesus described the accessible employee portal as a foundation, not a finish line. Once it was in place, product teams started building accessibly as the baseline, sourcing teams added accessibility boilerplate to every vendor engagement, and the ripple effects reached customers. The standout: a company with a workforce of whom more than 70% are disabled saw 5,000% year-over-year business growth using Honeywell's accessible scanner technology. 

2. The State of Colorado's culture shift ripples across federal and municipal partners. Karen traced the state's journey from the early rollout of HB 21-1110 and how they went from "What is accessibility?" to "Is this accessible?" across the org as training, governance, and vendor partnership standards took hold. Her other rule worth stealing: a bug is a bug is a bug. Stop treating accessibility issues as a separate backlog. Prioritize them alongside every other defect by impact, not by category. Check out the State of Colorado's Empathy Lab project to see how the state included folks with disabilities in this process. 

3. AI that isn't accessible doesn't just fail people — it fails at scale. Eamon made the math uncomfortably clear: if the large language models (LLMs) generating our code aren't producing conformant output, we're not just creating one inaccessible experience, we're automating exclusion at scale. That's why ServiceNow partnered with Joe Devon and the GAAD Foundation to build AIMAC (aimac.ai), an open-source tool that benchmarks accessibility conformance across 43+ LLMs. It's free, it's open-source, and any organization can use it to check their own models.

4. "Give accessibility a face." Paul was clear about the human impact--you can cite a thousand statistics about who needs accessibility features, but nothing moves leadership like a real person walking into the room and saying: "I am who we're building this for." As someone with an inherited eye disease that is progressively taking his sight, Paul challenges every organization to find and empower an ambassador. An ambassador changes the conversation from abstract KPI to the human in the room.

5. AI is a tool, not a fix, and it must not become another barrier. Karen invoked a word that makes accessibility practitioners flinch: overlays. The point is well taken: AI, like overlays, can create the illusion of accessibility while actually introducing new barriers if there's no human in the loop (HITL). Every panelist echoed the same principle from different angles--AI should augment human judgment, not replace the work of creating inclusive design. As Eamon put it, engaging people with disabilities directly is key, it's going to remain key, and no one on the panel sees that changing.

We closed with rapid-fire advice: 

• Eamon: Flip the empathy switch and the ripple effect handles the rest.
• Karen: Find your village, your champions, your partners--learn from and lean on each other.
• Jesus: Build a multi-vector business case that tells the story through every lens until it reaches the person who says "yes, how do I lean in?" 
• Paul: Lean on your humanity: behind every KPI is a human being who needs it to do their work.
• Everyone: Remember that accessibility features often start small and end up everywhere — voice input, captions, talk-to-text--the tools we all rely on every day started as accessibility innovations. 

Thanks for spending part of your GAAD with us. Awareness is one day, the work is all the days in between. Be sure to share with us your best practices and questions in the comments below and check out the A11y Playbook article for getting buy-in and scaling accessibility across your organization.