Inclusive Hiring & Workplace

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>> All right, Inclusive Hiring & Workplaces. So we've talked a lot about what we can do as developers to make things more accessible. There's a bit of a bias in a lot of what we're talking about and the tooling in how we do our jobs. And I just wanted to carve-out some time to say that this is accessibility is about working with people with disabilities also.

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We're not like saviors here. This isn't about charity or something. And we'll talk about that more in a second. But there's a little bit of a sad irony that we're talking a lot about accessibility and many of the platforms that we use to do our work are totally inaccessible.

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So, fortunately, there are some organizations and some laws around accessible workplaces. I have an infographic here from PEAT, or the Partnership on Employment and Accessible Technology. And they just sort of like go into all of the areas where levers could be pulled on making the workplace more accessible throughout technology.

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So, government comes into it, advocacy groups, employers have responsibilities here, technology companies for the tooling that we put out, education and research, so schools that have to teach it and have to be accessible themselves to students with disabilities. So it's just kind of interesting, we're not on our own here in thinking about this.

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There's groups that care a lot about accessible workplaces that we can lean on some of their wisdom to learn about this. And do what you can about ensuring that you don't have tools that are being used, like especially in hiring. Is your interview tooling totally inaccessible, cuz that's the first barrier right there.

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There's barriers throughout the work life cycle, but that first door, if you can't even apply for a job, that's discrimination. Kind of a big word, that's really what this is. So this isn't a statistics thing only, this is like, people with disabilities are literally shut out of the process.

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And so it's common but sometimes you're in a place to do something about it. So here's a quick story. When I worked at a past company, I saw some of our products that we were using, cloud services and things for HR, like performance reviews, like our HR software, it was easy to spot these issues.

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I mean, I was using it all the time. I was a manager at the time. And so I provided product feedback to both of those companies. Like, hey, here's a prioritized list of issues for you. One of the companies was so eager to fix that stuff that we got on a call and they were like, more, give us more, please, we love this.

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Awesome. The other company, crickets. So sometimes you can make a difference with this stuff, people are really into it. Sometimes it's just like throwing your feedback into the garbage can, unfortunately. But you might be able to influence procurement at your company if there's a more accessible alternative to something, just be aware of it.

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It might be outside the scope of your role, especially a big companies. But this kind of elephant in the room with accessibility is like, we don't wanna just work to make accessibility for people, we want true inclusion and true civil rights. That's where we wanna get to. On that note, centering people with disabilities.

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This goes beyond hiring. This is getting back to product development also. So we wanna remember what this is about. We don't wanna get caught up in just like being accessibility technicians. So there is a phrase in accessibility, nothing about us without us. We've been doing a lot of talking about accessibility today, so it is a little bit ironic to me that I'm saying this right now.

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But I just wanna share this with you so that we can try and open doorways in our work to involve people with disabilities, to join our teams, to consult with our teams. We're gonna pay people for their time. There is a book here called Nothing About Us Without Us, if you're curious about the history of disability rights.

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It's a very rich history, and I'm pretty in awe of how hard people have worked to gain their rights. A lot of our history in the US is because of this activist history, it's pretty awesome. But it sucks that people had to do that. They had to really fight for that.

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And in some ways, it's a lot easier for us on the web, we can just redesign stuff and rebuild stuff. It's like we don't have to knock down, we don't have to demolish a building to make more accessible entrances to it. But there are some analogs. Depending on how foundational the issues are, we might need to tear down the site and start over.

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But with technology it is slightly different. So yeah, we wanna advocate for accessibility or people with disabilities to be involved earlier in the process. So one last thing on this is that there's kind of a social media effect here that was pointed out to me years ago that there's a difference between accessibility Twitter or the accessibility world and the disability world or disability Twitter.

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Those are not the same. And being a young, eager accessibility person, that was kind of the first realization I had of that a lot of accessibility people are in positions of privilege. We kind of lose sight of what we're really talking about here, no pun intended. So just, yeah, if you get the opportunity, Twitter is not what it used to be.

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But disability Twitter is still on there. It's still a way that people connect with each other. People are sharing their experiences. So we'd be really wise to listen cuz people can tell us what frustrates them, especially with that accessibility statement. If they can tell you exactly what frustrates them about your site, that is a real gift.