Introducing Tuck
Yesterday I stood in the lobby of the Conference Center on the Mezzanine level of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport‘s Airport Office Building, white cane in hand, when a Dalmatian named Tuck, a certified therapy dog in a bright green “Animal Therapy @ SEA” vest, a proud SEApup, leaned into my palm for a scratch behind the ear. Tuck was working. I was learning. And Seattle, quietly and without fanfare, was showing a room full of us what the most accessible airport in America is starting to look like.
The Takeaway
What Seattle has built over the last several years is no longer a collection of amenities bolted onto a terminal, it is an integrated system with legal scaffolding, named owners, a community advisory structure, and a capital pipeline behind it. Inclusion, as I have been saying for as long as I have been saying anything, is not just the right thing to do, it is a strategic advantage, and SEA Access is proof.
Why I Was There
The Port of Seattle invited disability community members, airline partners, consultants, and advocates into the Amsterdam Room for its accessibility and traveler support event, a gathering that reflects what Port leaders call a “nothing about us without us” approach. As a long white cane user since childhood, a former president and CEO of two blindness organizations, including one of Seattle’s own, and now the managing director of a consulting firm advising companies on disability inclusion, I have spent my career at the intersection of lived experience and institutional change. I showed up not because I was curious whether SEA was doing something. I knew they were. I wanted to see whether what they are building is actually cohering into a system. My short answer: yes.
SEA Access Is a Program, Not a Promise
The umbrella name for the airport’s accessibility work is SEA Access, and the first thing worth saying about it is how interdepartmental it is. Facilities, customer service, volunteers, and community engagement staff all carry the work. A standing Accessibility Advisory Committee, disability community members, airline partners, and Port staff, gives the program its governance backbone and its conscience. And the airport sits in the small peer cohort of roughly fifty airports worldwide accredited under the Airports Council International program dedicated to airport accessibility. That is serious company to keep.
From the Sunflower Lanyard to the Sensory Room
Seattle was the first airport in the United States to adopt the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower lanyard, back in 2019. The symbol, born at London Gatwick in 2016 and now recognized at more than 240 airports across 30 countries, is a quiet piece of cloth that does real work. It tells a trained staff member that the person approaching them may need a little more time, a little more patience, or a little more help, without forcing that person to explain a condition that is often invisible. Autism, ADHD, dementia, epilepsy, chronic pain, the list of disabilities the sunflower honors is long, and the dignity of not having to disclose is, for many travelers, priceless.
That same year, SEA opened a Sensory Room on the train level of the A Gates station. Designed for travelers with autism, sensory processing disorders, and the kind of post-flight overload that can turn a successful trip into a crisis at baggage claim, it is now cited internationally as a model of what airports can do with a modest footprint and a careful design brief.
And the human tools matter as much as the physical ones. The communication cards that TSA and Customs officers at SEA now carry were developed by the airport’s ADA coordinator and a signage intern after a 2024 cyberattack knocked the airport’s digital systems offline for weeks. Low-tech, analog, and suddenly indispensable, a reminder that accessibility cannot live only in an app.
Meeting Tuck, and Why the SEApups Matter
Tuck is one of nine certified therapy-dog teams in the SEA Pups program. I will not pretend I was above being charmed, he is a remarkably gentle dog in a remarkably cheerful vest, but the program itself is serious work. Travel is among the most stressful experiences many people endure in a given year, and for passengers with anxiety disorders, sensory sensitivities, cognitive disabilities, or simply the ordinary terror of a delayed connection, the presence of a trained therapy dog in the terminal is not a gimmick. It is a calming intervention at the exact moment when a human being needs one.
Language Access Is Civil Rights Access
One of the things Seattle has done that most U.S. airports have not is treat language access as part of the same civil rights conversation as disability access. The Port’s Language Access Order directs a systematic plan for equitable access across languages, and the airport routinely publishes materials in Amharic, Chinese, Korean, Somali, Spanish, and Vietnamese, a profile that mirrors the communities actually passing through the terminal. Pathfinder volunteers and multilingual information-desk staff wear badge talkers showing the languages they speak and carry handheld translation devices. In 2025, the most requested languages at SEA were Mandarin, Korean, Spanish, Japanese, Vietnamese, Russian, French, Ukrainian, Arabic, and Khmer, with hundreds more available through live interpretation services.
For a traveler with limited English proficiency, a terminal is a series of barriers functionally similar to the ones a blind or Deaf traveler encounters. Seattle has noticed. Most of the industry still has not.
The Federal Pressure Is Real, and That Is a Good Thing
All of this is happening against a backdrop of federal rulemaking that is, at last, starting to catch up to the lived experience of disabled travelers. A 2024 Department of Justice rule requires state and local government web content and mobile apps to conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA within days of this writing, and the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 layered aviation-specific mandates on top: minimum training for personnel assisting wheelchair users, publication of aircraft cargo-hold dimensions so travelers know whether their chairs will fit, and a new Department of Transportation rule that now treats a mishandled wheelchair causing bodily injury as a violation of the Air Carrier Access Act.
I have spent enough time in Washington rooms to know that rulemaking without an enforcement record is a promise, not a guarantee. But these are the right promises, and airports that have invested in the underlying system, as SEA has, will be in a far better position to meet them than airports that are now, belatedly, starting to run.
Where the Gaps Remain
I want to be honest about what Seattle cannot yet solve on its own.
Airlines, not airports, handle wheelchairs. That means the single most common source of indignity and injury for wheelchair users in air travel sits just outside the Port’s direct authority. The new DOT rule helps. Enforcement will tell us how much.
Digital accessibility is also a work in progress. The 2024 cyberattack that took SEA’s website, check-in, baggage, and passenger-information systems offline for weeks was a reminder that travelers who rely on real-time accessibility information have the thinnest safety net of anyone in the terminal when the systems go dark.
And the federal WCAG deadline arrives amid signaled intent to revisit the rule to reduce compliance costs, introducing regulatory uncertainty even as the underlying civil rights obligation stands. The work, in other words, is not finished. Not here, not anywhere.
What This Means
For disabled travelers: Seattle is, increasingly, a terminal where you can expect more than a wheelchair at the curb. You can expect a sensory room, a sunflower lanyard, a therapy dog, a communication card, a multilingual volunteer, an ADA coordinator who takes your grievance seriously, and, crucially, a design ethic that anticipates you rather than accommodating you as an afterthought.
For employers and industry peers: The distinctive move Seattle has made is fusing disability access, language access, and equity under a single policy architecture. Most U.S. airports have not done this. The peers who adopt the pattern will be better prepared for federal rulemaking, better trusted by their communities, and, as the research on inclusive design has long suggested, better positioned to serve every traveler, disabled or not.
For policymakers: SEA is proof that a committed Port, a serious Commission order, and a standing advisory committee can translate federal civil rights law into a terminal experience. The scaffolding matters. The architecture matters. And the outcomes are measurable.
A Final Word
I walked out of the Amsterdam Room with a notebook full of observations, a slightly dog-hair-dusted blazer, and a renewed conviction that the quiet work of building an accessible airport is among the most important civic work happening in this country right now. Seattle is not waiting for perfection. Seattle is building the system, closing the gaps as it finds them, and inviting the rest of us, disability advocates, corporate leaders, policymakers, travelers, into the room.
Let’s build something meaningful. Together, we can turn the quiet work of one Pacific Northwest airport into the standard every traveler deserves, not because accessibility is a nice thing to do, but because inclusion is a strategic advantage, and always has been.
” Inclusion isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s a strategic advantage. “
Dr. Kirk Adams, Ph.D.
Advocate, Leader and Keynote Speaker on Disability Inclusion & Leadership
Leading the Way to Accessible Innovation
Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion (ISDI)
Executive Director
Strengthening individual and organizational capability for creating diverse, inclusive and equitable workplaces.
Innovative Impact, LLC Consulting
Managing Director
Impactful Workforce Inclusion Starts Here
American Foundation for the Blind
Immediate Past President & CEO
To create a world of no limits for people who are blind or visually impaired.
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