The room at FHL Towers was big, bright, and quiet. Quiet in the way rooms get when the people in them are important and aren't quite sure yet why they're there. I had come to talk to Members of Parliament and parliament staff about accessible and inclusive communications, with a focus on social media. I had my supervisor beside me, the lift had worked, the floor was easy to move through. On paper, every box was ticked. And still, before I said a word about disability, I could feel the room deciding whether this was going to be a lecture!

So I broke it early. After introducing myself and what we'd be covering, I told them: if you have a question, please don't put your hand up, because it will stay up there the whole afternoon. The room laughed. Something in the air loosened. That laugh mattered more than it sounds like it should have, because it meant the room had stopped bracing and started listening!

I used that opening to get somewhere more uncomfortable. Partway through the presentation, I asked everyone to close their eyes and just listen. Then I read them a short piece of legislation, word for word, full legal jargon, no translation. When I finished, I asked how it felt!

"Jibberish," someone said. A few others nodded.

Exactly, I told them. This is what it sounds like to a lot of people in Fiji when legislation, news, and government social media posts are written this way. It's not only people with intellectual or psychosocial disabilities who get lost in that language. It's the elderly. It's most of us, most of the time. The room had spent ninety seconds being confused on purpose, and I felt the discomfort of that turn into something more useful: recognition.

That moment is the reason I'm writing this. Not because the building failed us. It didn't. The lift worked, the floor was accessible, and Fiji's Parliament complex itself was renovated for accessibility a few years back. The gap I sat inside that day and have sat inside in plenty of rooms before it, wasn't architectural. 

It was communication. 

It was every video without captions or an interpreter, every image posted without a description, every press release and piece of legislation written as if plain language were a concession rather than a basic requirement of being understood by the people it governs.

That distinction matters, because it's tempting to treat accessibility as something you finish: build the ramp, install the lift, tick the box. Fiji's Parliament has done real work on the physical side of that, and it shows. But a building can be fully accessible and still be unreachable to a blind constituent who can't get an image description, or a Deaf constituent watching a minister's Facebook video with no captions, or someone with an intellectual disability trying to parse a press statement written entirely in legal register. Inclusion that stops at the front door isn't finished. It's half done.

Here's what made that day different from a lot of others I've sat through: the room wanted more. 

People asked questions. They stayed afterward. And in the days following, I started seeing it. One Minister posted a video from a trip to the North, with a clear description in the caption and a plain explanation of the visit, in his own words. Parliament's own social media pages began adding image descriptions to photos they posted. Nobody told them their old posts had been wrong. They had simply sat in a room, heard what jibberish sounds like from the inside, and decided to do something different the next time they had a phone in their hand!

That's not unique to Fiji, and I don't think it's an accident, either. Across the Pacific, parliaments tend to follow a similar shape: real, sometimes hard-won progress on physical access, paired with almost no attention to communication access. We retrofit ramps before we retrofit language. We're more comfortable thinking about wheelchairs than about captions, because the first is visible and finite, and the second asks something ongoing of how we write, speak, and post, every single day. I've presented in rooms across this region that I could enter without difficulty and still leave having had no real way to follow what was said, because nobody had thought to ask whether the format itself was accessible to me.

I don't think this is a story about institutions failing to care. I think it's a story about institutions that have never had to live inside the gap they're legislating around, finally getting a few minutes inside it, and visibly not wanting to leave it the way they found it. That hunger, the questions, the Minister's caption, the image descriptions that started appearing without anyone being told to add them, is the actual story here. Parliaments are asking. The only question left is what we hand them when they do.

So here is one concrete thing any parliament reading this could do before the year is out: make image descriptions, captions, and plain-language summaries a standard part of how the institution communicates publicly, not a courtesy extended occasionally to people who ask. Write it into the social media and communications policy. Apply it to every post, every release, every video, as a baseline, not an afterthought. It costs little and asks nothing structural of a building that may already be accessible. It only asks that the words leaving that building are built the same way.

I have presented to lawmakers in rooms I could navigate and rooms I couldn't, on legislation that will shape my life and the lives of people like me, often without being sure the rooms could understand what disability inclusion was actually asking of them. That afternoon at FHL Towers, for the length of ten slides, they did. The job now is making sure that doesn't stay a moment. It becomes a habit.