Liz Jackson

Liz Jackson is a disability-design advocate and the founder of The Disabled List, a disability-led self-advocacy organization that brings disabled expertise into design practice and pedagogy. After becoming disabled in 2012, she began asking why her eyeglasses were treated as fashionable while her cane was not, a question that led her to challenge how the design field approaches disability. She argues against designing for people with disabilities in a charitable mode and instead calls on designers to examine the systems that disable people and to treat disabled people as collaborators rather than passive beneficiaries.

Through The Disabled List and its WITH Fellowship she connects disabled creatives with leading design studios. Jackson has been a TED Resident, a Nantucket Project Scholar, and an SYPartners Fellow, and her ideas about empathy, friction, and what she calls design questioning over design thinking have reframed conversations about inclusive design. She speaks on accessible and inclusive design, on the limits of empathy-driven approaches, and on centering disabled knowledge in the creative process.

Her talks reach designers, product teams, and creative organizations that want to move beyond compliance toward genuinely disability-led practice.