Happy new year! I hope you had a relaxing, reflective, and rejuvenating transition into 2026. I've been working on goal-setting and priorities, mostly while on a beach in another country. On my last day away, I received news that my friend and former colleague passed away, and I have been thinking about everything I learned from him in the year or so we worked together. Peter was an extremely cool guy who collaborated with more or less everyone in the Twin Cities digital scene. Hugs if you knew him and are also heartbroken.
Remembering Peter Quale, the best kind of leader
My former colleague Peter Quale passed away last month of gastric cancer at the age of 56, way too early. Peter was my first technical SEO lead and had a big part in assembling the team of curious rockstars with whom I learned organic search and discovery. His influence on my practice can't be understated, and I will remember how he balanced a sharp sense of humor with a strong ethical code. He was a guy who wanted to make the internet a better place.
Peter was rangy, sardonic, and perspicacious; his work was best-in-class and his vibes were Stipe-y . He understood how to pull all the algorithmic levers and how to wear all the SEO hats, and he knew how easy it was to conjure results in the massive blue ocean of the open web. But as a quintessential Gen X-er, he never opted to use the easy spam or manipulation tactics that he found annoying and opted instead for common-sense discoverability strategies that stood up to algo updates. He worked to establish technical readability and brand consistency, all while maintaining an innate empathy and curiosity of how humans interacted with the internet. When rapid-growth performance marketing gave him the heebie-jeebies, he switched his practice to accessibility.
Peter chose to improve technology that already existed, even though he knew where all the gold mines could be found. He was the first person I knew to voluntarily opt out of the executive path, choosing to practice rather than to manage. But even without the VP title attached, he remained a leader in his behavior and his choices. He understood work-life balance and adored his family. He modeled treating all his colleagues as equals, regardless of age or experience. Whether you were a CEO or an intern, with Peter, your ideas were equally valid and valued.
I appreciated Peter's sense of humor, cynical and sharp in the age of toxic tech positivity. He understood the absurdity of digital business culture without being unkind. When I found an aspect of tech marketing hilariously dopey—a silly company name or some ridiculous SEO claim—he laughed along without tacking on the common manager coda of "welp, unfortunately capitalism we gotta make the money." He recognized that, being complex and intelligent humans, we could acknowledge the house of cards without collapsing it.
Peter was also a master of the soft, hilarious algorithmic troll. To combat the slow rise of digital conservatism, or just to mess with hateful jerks, he bought MichelleBachmann.com or MicheleBachman.com (or both, maybe) and used the off-brand name URLs to direct to resources that supported LGBTQIA+ youth. (The loathsome politician whose name he intentionally misspelled ran conversion therapy camps in Minnesota.) Probably because of his own name's resemblance to a doltish politician's, he understood that misspells could easily become a part of a search result, mostly because of human psychology but also because that's how big data and natural language understanding work. Once he trolled Ted Nugent over some birther bs, which I still consider varsity-level internet activism.
He kept collections of strange human internet behaviors. He maintained a Tumblr that assembled eBay mirror selfies: people selling mirrors on eBay who didn't have the composition skills to photograph a mirror without photographing themselves. Like many early search marketers, he had a memory file of ridiculous queries he encountered throughout his research. Once I asked him for his favorite search term with the phrase "near me," and he immediately recalled a winner: "dog near me to buy." We speculated on who might search for "dog near me to buy," and the train of thought that inspired the infinitive modifier.
As his obit states, Peter's final decade of work centered on accessibility. His transition to the field of accessibility was admirable, especially because Doing the Right Thing for a Relatively Small Percentage of Users is an extremely hard sell. It's time-intensive and forces companies to address product deficiencies and blind spots they'd rather ignore. Digital products are often built by young teams who have not had to navigate care for their aging parents or have not experienced disability directly. There are automated solutions to identify accessibility issues, but at some point, businesses have to put the work into making very incremental improvements. When presented with a menu of digital improvement options, very few businesses actively choose accessibility over rapid growth marketing tactics that make lots of money, at least until accessibility feels legally required. Peter chose the less lucrative path to do the most good.
Aside from maintaining logical content structure, I have not kept up on best practices in accessibility, and Peter's passing sparked a reconsideration. I know that many technologies under the umbrella of AI have the potential to vastly improve accessibility on a global scale, but that mainstream AI products themselves are rarely optimized for disabled users. (Many mainstream AI search products are not optimized for any users at all, when we're being honest.)
In Peter's memory, I'm looking into the landscape of accessibility tech. Although I'll never be an accessibility specialist, I'm looking into the newsletters I can add to my inbox and consultants I can add to my referral roster. (If you are writing a newsletter about accessibility or you are an accessibility consultant, please reply to this email or reach out!)
If you're the kind of person who looks at digital content critically and wants to improve the experience of generally being online, and if you want to expand your skills in 2026, I'd advise exploring accessibility as a specialization. Large portions of the internet remain a minimum viable product. More than any other branch of user experience (UX) or content marketing, accessibility is relatively recession-proof. When done right, accessibility dovetails into structured content and search optimization. It's not rapid-growth, but we still have laws that require businesses to maintain accessible digital services, and there are far too few accessible digital products. You'll also feel better about yourself, on a general moral and ethical scale, optimizing for accessibility rather than rapidly producing AI marketing content for no reason.
Thanks, Peter. You were an inspiration, and we'll all miss you.
The Content Technologist is a newsletter and consultancy based in Minneapolis, working with clients and collaborators around the world. The entire newsletter is written and edited by Deborah Carver, an independent content strategy consultant.
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