Built in, not bolted on: How Amanda Lawrie-Jones is breaking barriers in travel and business

There’s a particular kind of expertise that only comes from being the person entering a room that wasn’t built for you. Amanda Lawrie-Jones has that expertise — and she’s turned it into a career that’s changing how Australian organisations think about access and inclusion. 

Lawrie-Jones is an access and inclusion consultant, advocate, and systems-change leader working across government, corporate, and community sectors. She is the founder of Accessible Action and president of Scleroderma Victoria. 

Her work draws on both lived experience as a woman with disability and her extensive professional influence on policy, infrastructure, and organisational change at local, national, and international levels.

“I support organisations to move beyond compliance and towards meaningful inclusion,” said Lawrie-Jones. 

“That means thinking about access at the design stage, embedding it into decision-making, and ensuring it is reflected in real-world outcomes for people.”

Lawrie-Jones lives with scleroderma, a chronic autoimmune condition that progressively affects the connective tissues, skin and organs. She is also a double amputee. That combination shapes how she moves through the world in her professional and personal life. 

Every flight, every hotel booking, every conference venue is a system to be tested, navigated, and quietly assessed for whether it was designed with people like her in mind. More often than not, it wasn’t. She has faced more than her fair share of access barriers, misleading or conflicting access information, and outdated attitudes towards the kind of life she should aspire to.

Rather than letting that be a limitation, she’s made it the foundation of her career and the inspiration to open the door for those who come after her.

Rebuilding broken systems of unfair barriers

Before her career in access consulting, Lawrie-Jones spent years in risk and compliance at a large corporation, navigating complex systems and governance frameworks. Upon returning to work after her second leg amputation, she found that everything had changed in ways that made her work inaccessible. 

“I was confronted with significant barriers, not just physical, but cultural and systemic,” she said. 

The need to embed access and inclusion swiftly became more real and evident than ever. Without meaningful change, Lawrie-Jones was disempowered and locked out of the work she had been doing for years. 

“What started as a challenge became a turning point. A conversation with the chief risk officer led to the opportunity to develop the organisation’s disability action plan, and from that moment, I never looked back,” she said.

“That experience fundamentally reshaped my career and gave me a clear sense of purpose, combining both lived experience and lived expertise to influence how organisations think about access and inclusion.”

Whether she is developing and strengthening disability action plans, facilitating co-design with people with lived experience, reviewing policies, environments and systems through an access lens or delivering training and capability-building programs, Lawrie-Jones is committed to changing how people and businesses view access.

What sits at the core of it all is a phrase she returns to often: access should be built in, not bolted on. She explained that most people still think of accessibility as physical design — ramps, lifts, accessible bathrooms — or as a compliance checklist. The reality is broader and more demanding.

“Access and inclusion isn’t just about physical design or compliance — it’s about how systems are structured, how decisions are made, and whose perspectives are valued,” she said.

“When inclusion is done well, it benefits everyone, but it requires intentional design, not retrofit solutions.”

It’s not enough to consider access once a project is complete. Without factoring in universal design from the very beginning, solutions that come as an afterthought will be more expensive, less effective, and signal that access is “nice to have” rather than a necessity. 

Lawrie-Jones knows all too well that real systems change requires an insider; someone to influence projects and policies from their inception. Alongside consulting, she sits at decision-making tables, including the Victorian Disability Advisory Council, as president of Scleroderma Victoria since 2015, and as chair of Scleroderma Australia. She was a finalist in the 2018 National Disability Leadership Awards and a nominee for the 2020 Aspire Awards. 

Travel is where accessibility gaps show up fastest

Lawrie-Jones’ activism is multifaceted. Sometimes it looks like a boardroom conversation or a redrafted policy. Other times, it looks like getting on a plane.

“One of my absolute favourite things in life is flying,” she said

“I often say ‘the sky is my high’. There’s something incredibly freeing about getting on a plane and going somewhere new.”

That joy — the lounge, the plane, the destination — is real. But for a person with disability, every journey also carries an added layer of complexity. 

“Every journey involves planning, communication, and a level of trust in systems that aren’t always designed with you in mind,” she said.

During a period spent working at Qantas, Lawrie-Jones contributed to accessibility improvements across aviation operations — policy, training, customer and workforce experience. The role, she said, “really deepened my understanding of the operational complexity behind travel, and the gap that can exist between intention and lived reality”. 

She’s especially interested in where the aviation disability standards are heading, and the opportunity they represent to drive more consistent, embedded accessibility across the travel experience. 

She said that travel is where accessibility gaps become evident very quickly.

“You’re outside your usual supports, navigating unfamiliar environments, and relying on systems that often haven’t consistently considered diverse needs.” 

The result is often a kind of forced ingenuity — becoming adaptable and resourceful to access the same experiences many take for granted. 

One of her most common barriers is inconsistent information. A hotel claims to be accessible, but upon arrival, the reality doesn’t match. Physical barriers remain. Staff haven’t been trained to support diverse needs. 

To navigate this, Lawrie-Jones has built a working playbook asking detailed, specific questions rather than relying on generic ‘accessible’ labels, building in flexibility and contingency, connecting with local networks for real insights, and advocating clearly when barriers arise. But what stands out as often as the failures, she said, are the moments when people go the extra mile to make positive change. 

“Even in environments that aren’t perfectly accessible, people who are willing to listen, problem-solve, and adapt can transform an experience,” she said.

When systems, staff and environments come together well, the result is “a sense of ease and possibility that shouldn’t be exceptional, but still often is”. 

Lawrie-Jones has found that travelling is where the gap between what people claim to value and what they actually commit to doing becomes impossible to ignore, and where the reasons for a universal commitment to doing better are most compelling. 

How can we do our part to encourage more accessible travel?

For people who don’t live with disability, accessibility can feel like someone else’s concern. This is not the case.

“Accessibility isn’t a niche issue. It affects a huge number of people, including families, ageing populations, and people with temporary injuries,” she said.

A helpful place to start is awareness that designing for access benefits us all, and should be on everyone’s radar from the beginning. It’s not about “doing something nice for others”, it’s about human rights and equity. From there, we can take simple but powerful and practical steps. 

We can show support by giving our business to travel companies that take access and inclusion seriously. We can advocate in our interactions with corporations, demonstrating that access matters to travellers without disability, too.

When booking travel, ask specific questions and notice how operators respond. Offer feedback about what’s working and what isn’t. Contact businesses to share your expectations as a customer, because, as Lawrie-Jones notes, change often happens when organisations realise their customers care. Speak about inclusion openly in your own conversations, and call out its absence when you see it.

These small acts can add up to powerful change.

“Every time we push back, ask questions, or share experiences, it creates pressure for systems to improve,” Lawrie-Jones said.

The life the work protects

Despite her passion and commitment to access and systems change, there’s so much more to Lawrie-Jones’ life than her work. Her life beyond the boardroom is full of the things her career exists to protect access to. She loves New York. And she loves theatre — the kind of details that remind you that disability advocacy is, in the end, about the right to a full and ordinary life: the right to dress up, travel, see a show, take up space in the world on your own terms.

Lawrie-Jones’ career is built on a quietly radical idea: that lived experience isn’t a limitation to work around, but expertise to design with. The systems she’s helped reshape are the proof — and watching the next chapter of her work unfold, across consulting, governance and the spaces in between, is one of the more hopeful things to pay attention to in Australian access and inclusion right now.

There’s plenty more to come, and the rest of us are better off for it.