I'm available for the right conversations, not all of them.
I talk to professional rooms, not illness rooms.
- The decisions that are nearly free before the walls close. For rooms full of people whose clients are about to renovate.
- Why your client won't use what you recommended. The equipment gets installed and then it doesn't get used.
- Planning around the worst week, not the best day.
What I won't talk about
- Wellness, in any form, except to name it and decline it.
- Overcoming. Inspiration. Anything where the point of the story is that I'm still standing.
- Anybody's diagnosis but my own.
Somebody in the room has to be the person who lives with it.
I'm a residential accessibility consultant in Chicago.
Almost everything sold to a body like mine was designed by people who will never use it, signed off by people who will never use it, and photographed against a wall that belongs to nobody. It works. It holds weight. It passes. And it looks like it came with a schedule and a call button.
That is not a requirement of the engineering. The materials that make something safe have nothing to do with the ones that make it ugly.
Look at it before it's finished. A product in development, at the point where the housing, the finish and the fixing method are still arguments rather than tooling. That is the only moment any of this is cheap, and it is the same argument I make to homeowners about drywall.
Use it in a real house. Mine, for as long as it takes to find the thing that only shows up in week three. Not a demo, not a trade floor.
Tell you where it will actually go. Clearance, reach, approach, what it sits next to, and whether the person installing it will put it somewhere that works. Most of what goes wrong with a good product is where it ends up.
Say what it looks like in a room somebody chose. Not whether it hides. Whether somebody would put it in a bathroom they picked the tile for.
Endorse something I haven't lived with. No exceptions, and no rates for it.
Help you make it disappear. If the brief is that nobody should notice it, I'm the wrong person. The standard is good on purpose, sitting out where you can see it.
Be the disabled woman in the campaign for a product I would not use.
I'm a Certified Environmental Access Consultant, through VGM Live At Home. VGM Education is accredited by IACET, the program carries 0.6 IACET CEUs, and RESNA approves those CEUs toward recertification. Before that, twenty years of making a case to people who could say no.
Bio and headshot, so you don't have to ask.
Briana J Watson is a residential accessibility consultant. She helps people plan a house around a body that has changed. Hers changed at eight, when the migraines started, and she was twenty-two when she found out that's what they were, which is where she learned that an answer is something you go and get. She speaks about the decisions that are nearly free before the walls close.
If you're putting together something that sounds like a fit, let's talk.
Email is the best way to reach me. Tell me what you're working on, who your audience is, and roughly when you're hoping to record or host. I'll get back to you.
Email me