PerennialA11y - Digital Accessibility & Responsible AI Engineering

Mission

What is the most important cause or mission? What does the world most need?

Ugh. I think these are actually really dangerous (or at least, incomplete) questions. It presumes an absolute, universal, and static hierarchy or prioritization that all humans should follow. It strikes me as very incomplete and the wrong first question.

We can start off with a better question that fortunately for us humans, we can observe by looking at what nature already figured out naturally, effortlessly, and perfectly. Honeybees are some of the most important species on the planet due to the impact they have on ecosystems across the world due to their role as pollinators. And yet, forcing animals (even if they could be forced somehow) to do the honeybee's job would be a terrible idea. Elephants, vultures, wasps for example, are not designed nor suited to pollinate. It is not in their nature, instinct, or practical capabilities. Even if we could reprogram the elephants, vultures, and wolves to start being pollinators, who then would serve the unique niches they fulfilled? If you're an animal expert, forgive my simplifications, but some of the functions that elephants do are disperse seeds and modify their environment benefiting all the other species in their habitat. Vultures recycle dead animals and sanitize the envirronment without violence. Wasps also pollinate, but they also kill many of the other insects that would otherwise wreck many plants or organisms. The most important role for any organism or being is to carry out its unique role/niche it is adapted for.

Complications may seem to arise within the same species, but the same law applies there too. The older human sibling might have a role as the future oriented responsible child while the younger human sibling may be better suited to be the more fun present oriented child. While they could do one or the other or multiple things, any one being has finite capabilities, resources, and attention that there will be tradeoffs at one point.

Long story short is that one of the most important things we can (rather than should) do, for the benefit of ourselves and others, is to find out what the most important thing that we are each uniquely suited to do. That is possible if we know what we are. And I find the world or society as it is to be pretty bad at helping us find out what we are - it would much rather tell us what we should or shouldn't be.

PerennialA11y LLC is a external extension of the drive to help both myself and others to find and be more of who we are. Digital accessibility is great heuristic, strategy, and process that can help us known if we really are respecting the diversity of other humans. A more accessible world means a world where it's not only the average or those who lucked into the kind of race that society values wins. An accessible world is a better world because it means that people who have differences from the norm (which includes someone who has a disability statistically) can not only survive, but thrive as they are which would be good for both themselves and everyone else. A honey bee is not broken in a wasp's nest nor is a wasp's nest broken in a bee hive.

The recent emergence and popularity of generative AI threw an interesting curveball. Excluding the power, wealth, and status seekers, the visionaries and leaders behind the race to AGI (artifical general intelligence) have their hearts in the right place. The idea is that if we can solve AGI, we can then accelerate and solve every other industry. As of 2026, AI can be used to help do work in many industries. There are definitely many potential dangers, risks, and consequences of AI literally similar to having nuclear warheads and probably even worse, but what is undeniable is AI is not going away and there are more responsible and less responsible ways to build, use, and deploy AI. Even if AI can solve every material and societal problem in the world, would it be worth to have boiled the oceans, destroyed our human and cognitive sovereignty, or corrupted or hearts and souls to get there? AI is a force multipler, but that vector can be positive or negative. AI is that tricky thing that can both be beneficial in the short term and long term and also destructive in the short term and long term. AI is also an assistive technology for many of us so it's also a part of accessibility and AI can also help us further the field of assessibility.

If I should say so, PerennialA11y LLC's mission fundamentally is to help humans find and be who we are using digital accessibility and responsible AI as both the vehicle and indicator for doing it right.

Principles