09/30/2026
Imagine walking into an airport and discovering there were no signs anywhere.
No directions to your gate. No indication of where security is. No way to know where baggage claim, restaurants, or restrooms are located.
How would you react?
That is what Paralympic triathlete Kyle C**n asked us to imagine yesterday at the All Wheels Up Global Forum on Accessible Air Travel.
Sitting there listening to him, I kept thinking about how easy it is to overlook barriers that don’t affect us personally.
For someone who is blind, an airport that most of us navigate almost automatically can become much harder when information is presented in only one way.
That is an important lesson for accessibility policy. We have to look at systems from the perspective of people whose abilities and experiences differ from our own, identify the barriers they encounter, and keep finding practical ways to make those systems work better.
That is a big part of what we are trying to do at the Accessibility Policy Institute.
And Kyle is a pretty remarkable reminder of what people can accomplish when given the opportunity.
A full-distance triathlon is a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a 26.2-mile run.
Kyle does that without sight.
If he can do all of that blind, the least we can do is keep working to make the airport easier for him to navigate.
