Lionel Wolberger is COO of UserWay, a full accessibility solutions provider, and a W3C Accessible Platforms Architect.
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Ongoing disability awareness in the workplace is essential for enterprises striving to achieve full digital accessibility for their customers as well as their employees. Without a structured and intentional advocacy plan in place, full digital accessibility compliance efforts can derail. In other words, if disability awareness is never adopted into the ethos of a company, accessibility initiatives can quickly become just another task to keep management happy. Digital accessibility should be driven by the desire to create products and services that support equal opportunity among marginalized communities.
Achieving this shift in values requires a top-down investment into culture building, where executives take measured and intentional steps to support disability awareness training.
Functional Accessibility As The True Goal
With the surge in web accessibility lawsuits in recent years, one of the biggest challenges facing today’s digital accessibility movement is the obsession with compliance scores. The hard reality is a company can achieve a high accessibility compliance score by meeting technical requirements and still be sued because the content isn’t functional.
For instance, alt text can be applied throughout an entire website’s image and design gallery, and an accessibility audit test may even give you positive feedback for complying with technical usage. However, the actual substance of those alt text descriptions may not accurately portray the image or its intent.
These sorts of problems on the user experience level are remedied by translating disability awareness values to frontline and middle-management, where remediation and compliance work is happening.
Fostering Disability Awareness
The best place for biases and toxic stereotypes to form is in a void. The reality is many team members and managers have never worked with someone with disabilities and may not be familiar with anyone who is blind, deaf or has a motor impairment. Simple exposure to the topic of disability awareness can set the tone and groundwork for how they perceive the disabled community. One study found that children with a better understanding of disability tend to have more positive attitudes toward individuals with a disability.
Companies may consider annual recurring training sessions where teams can learn from disability awareness workplace experts or someone with a disability who has first-hand knowledge working in a particular industry. Unfamiliarity with these types of circumstances is what allows toxic perceptions to persist. The more people can engage with people with disabilities and truly understand that their abilities are not what makes them human, the more we can form true respect.
Systemic Biases
Bad ideas and attitudes toward disabilities can be perpetuated by systemic and structural ableism.
For instance, there may be subliminal beliefs about motor disabilities held by some of your employees. Still, because your company’s digital application process is not designed appropriately for integration with the assistive tools, there are never members of this community hired and an opportunity for those beliefs to be confronted and corrected.
Your enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform may have accessibility flaws in a common report filing process preventing a user from navigating and submitting the form strictly through keystrokes and requiring the use of a mouse. Because of this flaw, an employee who is blind is required to constantly ask co-workers to complete the final submission process for them. Your employees are always happy to help, but the situation feeds the belief among your staff that people who are blind are helpless and dependent.
What ideas are being encouraged by your organization’s structure?
Nailing Down Language And Messaging
How your company talks about disabilities is also critical. It sets the tone and expectations for your team members.
There are subliminal ways words can affect and perpetuate attitudes and perceptions. This is where things like person-first language come into play, prioritizing a person instead of reducing them to their disability. Terms like “the disabled” should be avoided and substituted with “people with disabilities.” Instead of referring to someone as “a blind,” they should be referred to as “an employee who is blind” and only if their visual impairment is relevant.
Are your training materials, your employee handbook and benefits portals clumsy and derogatory on the topic of disabilities? It’s not enough to lead by example in this regard, either. There needs to be intentional training available to help your organization respectfully discuss disabilities and foster a culture that emphasizes the need for accessibility.
Launching A Disability-Related ERG
One practical step to establishing a pipeline of continual disability advocacy is to establish a disability-related employee resource group (ERG). A well-positioned ERG can act as an incubator for ideas and vision and a signal of support and good faith toward the disabled community.
A disability-focused ERG can:
• Educate teams about the problems workers with disabilities face at work.
• Create a space where people with disabilities can talk about workplace issues.
• Help improve hiring practices and advocate for applicants with disabilities.
• Be a resource for corporate leaders for feedback.
• Help brainstorm activities that foster a culture of empathy and inclusion.
Hosting Empathy Labs
Hosting an empathy lab can be a unique opportunity to interact directly with members of the disabled community. These labs can give real-world exposure to the barriers one may face when trying to access your website with a vision, hearing, cognitive or motor disability.
In conclusion, to foster environments that are inclusive for people with disabilities, companies need to do their part to set the tone for how their work culture approaches these sensitive topics, including identifying and correcting systemic deficiencies, establishing a standard for discussing disabilities, and creating structure for education on inclusion.
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