In March 2016, a tech company in Dublin hired its first accessibility coordinator. She sat on the fourth floor, shared a desk with facilities, and spent fourteen months building a system: captioned all-hands meetings, screen-reader-compatible internal tools, a workflow so that when a Deaf employee or a blind employee or someone with chronic fatigue joined a team, the infrastructure already existed. She didn’t wait for requests. She designed the room before anyone arrived.

In February 2025, the company cut the role. Not her specifically. The role. The accessibility coordinator position folded into a general “people experience” function staffed by someone with no disability expertise. The captioning contract lapsed. The screen-reader audits stopped. The workflow she’d built wasn’t deleted. It just had no one to run it.

Here is what I keep seeing. The coverage of corporate DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) rollbacks names race. It names gender. It does not name disability. I watched it happen across twelve major outlets in a single week this spring. The word “disability” appeared in two of them. Both times in a list, third position, after a semicolon.

This is not an oversight. This is a floor plan. You can read a building’s priorities by what it puts on the ground floor and what it sends to the basement. Disability infrastructure inside corporations was always the basement office. The accessibility coordinator, the accommodation pipeline (the process for requesting and approving workplace accommodations), the disability employee resource group. These were never the visible commitments. They were the quiet ones. The ones companies could cut without anyone outside noticing, because no one outside was watching that corridor.

Christine Sun Kim, a Deaf artist, made a piece in 2015 called All Day that shows four clocks, each face relabeled with phrases describing how she moves through time through the lens of Deaf experience: “obligation time,” “ASL time.” The structure is the argument. Corporate accessibility worked on obligation time—the bare minimum required by law, turned into daily function by someone who understood both the legal requirement and the human reality. The coordinator translated legal rights into daily function. Without her, the rights still exist on paper. The paper sits in a drawer.

Someone will say: the law still requires accommodation. True. An employee can still file a request. A manager can still approve it. The mechanism is the same the way a map with no street names is the same as a map with them. Technically complete. Functionally useless for the person standing at the corner.

What was lost is not a programme. It is a translation layer. The person who knew that “reasonable accommodation” meant a specific chair ordered from a specific vendor with a specific lead time. Who knew that the captioning service dropped out after forty-five minutes and had a backup. Who recalled that the last Deaf hire quit after three months because no one budgeted for interpreters at the team offsite. That knowledge lives in a person, not a policy document. It disappears exactly the way an unrecorded sign in sign language (ASL) disappears — the moment the hands stop moving.

The fourth floor desk in Dublin is still there, reassigned, facing the same window.