12. Accessibility by Design 🥳

When I was younger, I spent a lot of time alone with books. 📚 

Reading was the one thing that let me stay up a little later — a quiet permission to exist in another world for a while.

But even in all those stories, I rarely saw anything that felt like me.

No Inuktitut.

No Northern references.

No little sparks of home.

All the while, in the greeting-card aisle, it was the same feeling: wall after wall of “Happy Birthday,” “Get Well Soon,” “Thinking of You”… beautiful cards, but nothing that spoke my language — literally or spiritually.

So when I started The Qujanaq Project, accessibility wasn’t just about price or scale.

It was about presence.

Even if nobody buys a single card, the Inuktitut still exists in the world. 🌎 

The colours still exist. 🫶

The little pieces of home still exist. 🪞

The representation still exists — outside of my head, outside of my sketchbook, outside of the idea stage.

That alone matters. 🙃

These 5x7 pieces are intentionally small: small enough to be affordable, small enough to mail, small enough to sit on a desk or a fridge — but big enough to hold emotion, memory, and language.

They aren’t designed as products chasing a specific market.

They’re designed as offerings — tiny acts of cultural continuity, tiny bridges of accessibility, tiny reminders that our stories deserve to be seen in everyday places, not just in museums or reports.

Art doesn’t need a million people to buy it to matter. ☺️

Sometimes it just needs to exist — to take up space quietly, confidently, in a world that didn’t always make room for us.

That’s what accessibility means to me: Art that welcomes. Language that breathes. Stories that live outside of myself, so they can live anywhere.

Accessibility by design isn’t a strategy — it’s a choice. 🤌

It’s choosing to make art that anyone can hold, choosing to share language even if only a few will understand it, choosing to let Inuktitut take up space simply because it deserves to.

It’s the quiet belief that representation doesn’t need an audience to be real. It just needs a place to land.

So whether one person buys a card or a hundred people simply pass by the website, the work is doing what it was meant to do: existing, expressing, and taking up space. 🙌

That’s accessibility.

Not just in price — but with presence.

Not just in language — but with intention.

Not just in design — but with heart.

And honestly? That’s a flex. 😛😉 

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Chelsea Singoorie
ᓯᐅᓯ ᓯᖒᕆᖅ
Founder & Artist, The Qujanaq Project by Nunabox