A clunky accommodations process can undo years of diversity work in a single bad moment. Neil Milliken sits down with disability inclusion consultant Deb Dagit to get specific about what actually helps employees with disabilities thrive at work and what quietly blocks them, even inside well-meaning companies. Deb shares her lived experience with apparent and non-apparent disabilities, and the practical realities of mobility devices, hearing aids, and a service dog, not as inspiration but as everyday context employers need to understand.

We trace Deb’s journey from early corporate discrimination to founding a nonprofit focused on disability employment, to lobbying for the Americans with Disabilities Act and witnessing the ADA signing in 1990. From there, she returns to the corporate world and becomes one of the early Chief Diversity Officers, giving her a rare long-view on how workplace accessibility, disability rights, and organisational culture move forward. We also talk about why disability inclusion is increasingly recognised as a major market opportunity, and how assistive technology and digital accessibility can expand independence and productivity across neurodiversity, hearing, vision, and mobility needs.

Then we get practical: centralised accommodations budgets, a supported assistive technology catalogue, and the reality that HR can create friction while managers sometimes cut through it. That creates a hard question we don’t dodge: if your access to “reasonable adjustments” depends on whether you got a good boss, is that equity? We close with a grounded look at AI accessibility, why it may be the biggest assistive-tech leap in 25 years for executive function and cognitive accessibility, and why human oversight is non-negotiable to reduce bias and harm.

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Accessibility is not a “nice to have” add-on to the economy. It is consumer protection, civil rights, and a growth strategy, and it only becomes real when disabled people are in the rooms where power is exercised. We’re joined by Katrin Langensiepen, a Greens Member of the European Parliament, to talk candidly about what disability representation looks like inside EU policymaking, and how easily the media and the public can reduce a disabled politician to a single topic even when the work spans internal market regulation, social affairs, and equality.

We also get honest about intersectionality and why some people resist the word. Disability never shows up alone: it intersects with gender, migration, race, poverty, and sexuality, and ignoring that reality leaves the most marginalised people behind. Katrin and our hosts explore how ableism shapes fear, how “inspiration” framing can still be dehumanising, and how far-right narratives can pretend to be on disabled people’s side while blaming migrants and refugees for scarcity. That strategy works when communities are made to feel they must compete for dignity.

From there, we shift to the European Accessibility Act and what enforcement really takes. EU accessibility law can set a powerful umbrella standard, but member states control implementation, monitoring, and penalties, which can mean delays, half-measures, and court battles. We connect the dots to AI regulation and assistive technology: AI can close gaps for disabled people, but it can also automate discrimination in hiring and services unless rules protect human rights. We close with a practical lever that often gets overlooked: procurement power, and why buying standards can move markets faster than good intentions.

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Your inbox is where productivity goes to die, especially when the tools assume you can constantly scan a screen, hunt for tiny buttons, and triple-check every draft. We sit down with Sriram, founder of Lumin, to unpack what happens when an AI voice assistant is built for blind and low vision users first and held to a higher standard: it has to be accurate enough to trust, fast enough to use daily, and deep enough to handle real email workflows instead of shallow commands.

Sriram shares his journey from video game engineering and immersive tech to entrepreneurship, then the turning point of progressive vision loss from cone rod dystrophy. That lived experience shapes Lumin’s core idea: “talk to your email” in a way that actually gets work done. You’ll hear a live demo where Lumin summarizes new mail, opens a message, describes a photo attachment clearly for social media, drafts a reply, takes an edit, and sends only after confirmation. The conversation digs into why this kind of AI productivity tool is fundamentally different from generic chat apps and why handling attachments, revisions, and back-and-forth is where most assistants break down.

We also get concrete about accessibility and inclusive design: co-design with Lighthouse for the Blind, screen reader support, robust text zoom, and a simplified interface that keeps power in voice commands. Then we look ahead at the product roadmap, including Outlook and calendar support, plus the longer-term vision of meeting users on more devices like Android, smart glasses, and eventually cars. Finally, we tackle AI trust and privacy head-on: clear disclosure of cloud providers, visibility into what Lumin remembers, and user control including account deletion.

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