The habit of inclusion in underpinned by learning and unlearning. Mostly unlearning.
Briar Harte (she/her) is a high-energy, high-impact disability inclusion changemaker. Years after acquiring her disability, a difficult pregnancy prompted Briar to start sharing her lived experience.
Today, Briar is an award-winning disability changemaker, working inside and alongside organisations to transform the experiences of disabled customers and employees. Briar's goal is to change the way business is done, advocating for customers and colleagues to make mainstream services more accessible and inclusive, and creating better human and commercial outcomes.
With global experience across banking, telecommunications, energy, technology, consulting, logistics, and beverages, Briar brings compelling commercial and customer experience case studies to life through her lived experience and vulnerability.
Briar has a broad range of expertise across disability, gender equity and LGBTQIA+ experiences. Where she doesn’t have lived experience, Briar has an array of stats, facts and friends to include in speaking events. Briar lives in Melbourne with her partner, Josie, and their daughter, Theadora. She writes a weekly(ish) newsletter, Mostly Unlearning.
Lived experience
- Acquiring a disability in my 20’s, as an immigrant
- A disabled woman working in global corporate roles
- Pregnancy and parenting with a disability, in a rainbow family
- Member of the LGBTQIA+ community, through my partner's gender transition
Talking Points
Disability and accessibility can unlock human and commercial outcomes
Briar is changing the way business is done, advocating for customers and colleagues to make mainstream services more accessible, inclusive and profitable. Disability and accessibility can unlock human and commercial outcomes
In this talk, Briar’s storytelling blends compelling personal and business examples and simplifies complex, emotional topics into tangible, doable actions and habits.
Tailored to your business and industry, with real examples, Briar’s signature high-energy presentation style and Mostly Unlearning provocations will give the audience a clear way to recognise the opportunity and start shifting decisions and practices today.
Best suited to International Day of People with Disability, Disability Pride Month, Global Accessibility Awareness Day or Accessibility/Disability Action Plan Launch or accessible/inclusive product launch
Accessibility is AI Readiness (or AI has access needs)
Just like humans, AI has access needs. We don’t think about it in those terms yet—but we should. Accessibility is AI Readiness (or AI has access needs)
In this talk, I make the case that accessibility is AI readiness.
It’s the business case many designers, product leaders and accessibility experts have been looking for. We’ve upskilled and learned from lived experience yet budget holders and decision makers prevent accessibility.
As SEO gives way to Generative Engine Optimisation and Answer Engine Optimisation, accessibility is no longer a moral argument or a legal checkbox. Accessibility for AI Readiness is now a commercial advantage and a product and design imperative. It has become a signal — one of the strongest signals we have — for AI comprehension, trust, and visibility.
Best suited to Global Accessibility Awareness Day, International Day of People with Disability, Disability Pride Month or Accessibility/Disability Action Plan Launch
Disability is not a tragedy, it's a common, human experience.
Too often, disability is labelled either a tragic, life-altering event or an inspiring, paralympic acheivement. And while it can be both for most disabled people, it sits in between, as a common human experience. Disability makes up more than 20% of the population, 13% of the working-age population and more than 30% of households. By retirement, 50% of people have at least one disability. Disability is not a tragedy, it's a common, human experience.
We are all temporarily able. For most of us, we will experience disability in our lifetime. Disability can be from birth or acquired in our lives, and is a function of aging. We can be temporarily, situationally and permanently disabled.
In this talk, Briar will get audiences rethinking what disability is, can be, and some will wonder, “Wait, am I disabled too?”
Best suited to International Day of People with Disability, Disability Pride Month or Accessibility/Disability Action Plan Launch. Can be tailored to IWD, carers week, LGBTQIA+ events
Parallel Journeys: The Common Experience of Coming Out
It's not always understood that the LGBTQIA+ community and the disability community share a common experience of coming out. Disabled people, too, experience regularly coming out and for the 25 - 40% of the LGBTQIA+ community with a disability there is added complexity and frequency.Parallel Journeys: The Common Experience of Coming Out
In this talk, Briar draws parallels in these experiences. This is less about intersectionality, or when someone is part of both communities, and more about a common experience of each community. This talk has been particularly impactful with corporate audiences where employees have an affiliation with one community (usually disability) and resistance to supporting the other (often LGBTQIA+, especially trans). By focusing on the shared experience, Briar brings to light commonalities, rather than differences.
Best suited to events at the intersection of Disability and LGBTQIA+, including International Day of People with Disability, Disability Pride Month, LGBTQIA+ Pride Month, IDAHOBIT, Wear It Purple, Trans awareness events, or Inclusion Action Plan Launch or Inclusive product launch
Trickle-down diversity is not a thing; you have to choose to include. Gender equality must include disability.
“I want white, not-yet-disabled, cisgender, heterosexual corporate women to stop worrying about the inattention of white, not-yet-disabled, cisgender, heterosexual corporate men and understand their privilege. The role they so desperately want these men to play is the role non-white, disabled, LQBTQIA+ women/folk want them to play in support of true gender equality.”Trickle-down diversity is not a thing; you have to choose to include. Gender equality must include disability.
In this talk, Briar highlights the experiences of disabled women and urges those working toward gender equality to be accessible and inclusive of disability. While men and women experience disability at roughly the same rate, women are underrepresented on the NDIS, overrepresented as carers of disabled children and parents. Disabled mothers face stigma, and it’s still legal in Australia to sterilise disabled women. Disabled women experience some of the highest rates of child removal before leaving the hospital.
While not the focus of her talk, Briar speaks to gender inclusion from a trans inclusive standpoint; her partner is a trans woman.
Proximity to disability is not lived experience of disability.
Synopsis: Going from a disabled person with lived experience to a lived expertise professional has itself been a journey of unlearning. No one beamed accessibility into my head when I acquired a disability. Certainly, no one did when I started working full-time in accessibility. Having a lived experience of disability gives me a sense of others' experiences but not the lived experience itself. Proximity to disability is not lived experience of disability.
For DEI experts without disability lived experience, it can be a whole other challenge. As DEI teams get smaller, and rely on expert consultancy, disability and accessibility risk being forgotten. Disabled experiences are vast, access needs contradict, and the legislative landscape is vastly more complex than other DEI areas. This can be a tension for well-meaning executives, digital leaders and people in DEI roles, tasked with leading change across a range of diverse characteristics, often without lived experience of disability. But it's the decisions these people make that have a ripple effect on the lives and experiences of people impacted by disability.
In this talk Briar gest straight to the point, what DEI professionals need to know about disability and accessibility - disabled and not-yet-disabled.
Best suited to DEI events, bringing a disability lens to inclusion
