Remarkable is on a mission to create a world of opportunity, access and possibility for people with disability through investing in disability tech startups. Remarkable is the startup venture arm of Cerebral Palsy Alliance and Cerebral Palsy Alliance Research Foundation, offering four programs in North America and internationally (Design-athon, Launcher, Accelerator, Scaler) to support the disability tech startup ecosystem.

Their annual Tech Summit brings together investors, entrepreneurs, ecosystem builders, as well as accessibility and assistive tech experts. Attendees from around the world discussed how we can develop technology to improve the lives of people with disabilities, elevate disabled entrepreneurs and increase the accessibility of emerging technologies.

I joined a panel with Austin Hertell (Accessibility Program Manager, Google) and Steve King (Director, Atlassian Foundation), moderated by Joe Devon (Head of Accessibility, Future Monks, and founder of Global Accessibility Awareness Day). We had a wide ranging discussion about whether accessibility needs to be rebranded away from compliance and toward innovation, how corporations can support disabled entrepreneurs and the importance of involving people with disabilities in the design process.

A highlight of the conference was getting to meet TDP Member Zuby Onwuta face to face! Zuby presented a lightening talk about his lived experience of inaccessibility as someone with low vision and encouragement to continue including disability in our definition of diversity, recognize that age tech is part of disability tech, step up allyship from non-disabled folks, and keep promoting disability representation in all areas of leadership.

Another highlight was hearing Elizabeth Nguyen of Village Capital and Regina Kline of Smart Job and Enable Ventures present on a newly released research report: Disability Innovation: Empowering the Entrepreneurs Reimagining Inclusion Around the World

The research analyzes the global landscape for disability innovation hubs, accelerators and entrepreneurial support organizations in the innovation sector working to support the next generation of inclusive technology start-ups and to close the disability wealth gap.

Download the report now

Additional investors and ecosystem supporters presenting at the conference were:

moaz hamid, mvmt ventures: On a mission to make technology more accessible, empowering, and inspiring to the people we serve

Irene Mbari-Kirika and Julius Mbura, inAble: Empowering Persons With Disabilities In The African Continent

Diego Mariscal, 2Gether-International: The Leading Startup Accelerator for Disabled Founders

Minnie Baragwanath, Global Centre of Possibility: New Zealand based, globally-networked centre of Possibility leadership, design and innovation with the aim of creating a future that is truly accessible for all

Markeith Price, Move Progress: Fund for startups developing accessible and wellness technology solutions and strategic consulting firm

Five Remarkable Disability Tech Accelerator companies presented pitches in the Startup Showcase for a chance to win an additional $20,000 in funding.

Thane Hunt and Soniya Patel, Homind X: A grasping device for all day wear

Nicole Cuervo, Springrose: Comfortable, adaptive front closure bras

Kara Allanach, SpineX: Technologies that improve the lives of people with neurological conditions

Dion Kelly, Possibility Neurotechnologies: Brain-computer interfaces to control external devices through thoughts

Brandon Biggs, XR Navigation: Inclusive and accessible navigation solutions

Souvik Paul, Aurie: A catheterization solution that’s designed for your freedom

Congratulations to Nicole Cuervo of Springrose for winning the Startup Showcase!

Additional disabled founders presenting at the conference were:

Charli Skinner, Soda: Helping impact-driven organisations design more inclusive and accessible health and wellbeing solutions

Elizabeth Chandler, The Good Robot Company: Here to make sure your AI is bias-free for us and future generations

Matt Pierri, Sociability: Helping disabled people find accessible places

A big thank you and congratulations to Pete Horsley, Molly Levitt, and the entire Remarkable team for including Tech Disability Project and hosting an important and unforgettable gathering. These spaces are too few and far between and I savored every moment of of this accessible and inclusive space!

Remarkable Tech Summit 2023 Recap was originally published in Tech Disability Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Think and Zoom is

“Creating a world where visual impairment no longer steals dreams or kills careers”

Introducing

This summer we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, #ADA30, and this October, we are celebrating the 75th annual National Disability Employment Awareness Month, #NDEAM, as well as the annual Blindness Awareness Month, #BlindMonth. This year’s initiatives are centered on the theme of Increasing Access and Opportunity.

At Think and Zoom Future of Disability, we are doing our part by
shining the spotlight on “Disabled people solving Disability problems”.
We are highlighting the achievements of individuals who are ‘Overcoming Disability with creative abilities’.

We are promoting people who are turning personal problems into global solutions and igniting the #InclusionRevolution. At Think and Zoom, we believe that the #FutureOfDisability lies in Disabled Innovators!

Vint Cerf

● LinkedIn

● Facebook

● Twitter

● Location: Washington DC area

● Role/ Title: VP, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google

● Achievement: Widely known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet,” Vint Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet.

Gleison Fernandes Faria

● Instagram

● Facebook

● Location: Itauna, Brazil

● Role/ Title: Cofounder at Key2Enable Assistive Tech

● Achievement: Inventor of Key-X Keyboard, an innovative computer keyboard for people with Cerebral Palsy

Ralph Teetor Blind

● Location: Hagerstown, Indiana

● Role/ Title: President of Perfect Circle

● Achievement: Invented Cruise Control, also became the President of the Society of Automotive Engineers

Brandon Winfield

● LinkedIn

● Twitter

● Instagram

● Location: Atlanta, Georgia

● Role/ Title: Founder and CEO of iAccess Life

● Achievement: iAccess Life is a lifestyle, mobile application for users with mobility impairments to rate and review establishments based on their accessibility.

Alvaro Silberstein

● Twitter

● Instagram

● Location : Berkeley, California

● Role/ Title: Founder and CEO

● Achievement: He is Cofounder of Wheel the World, an online marketplace for people with disabilities to plan and book accessible trips.

Tyler Merren

● LinkedIn

● Twitter

● Facebook

● Location : Fort Wayne, Indiana

● Role/ Title: Owner of ReVision LLC

● Achievement: Creator of ReVision audio-based fitness app for the blind, Paralympic athlete and personal trainer.

● Website

Dr. Birendra Raj Sharma Pokharel

● LinkedIn

● Facebook

● Twitter

● Location: Nepal

● Role/ Title: Former Senior Commissioner at the Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons (CIEDP) by Government of Nepal

● Achievement: Creator of Innovative Training Program for blind women called “Service Above Self: detecting breast cancer by blind women using Medical Tactile Examination”

Adriana Mallozzi

● LinkedIn

● Facebook

● Instagram

● Location: Boston, Massachusetts

● Role/ Title: Founder and CEO at Puffin Innovations

● Achievement: Patented Inventor of Puffin, an Oral control Smart Device, for people with Cerebral Palsy to easily control their electronic devices.

Joshua Miele

● LinkedIn

● Twitter

● Website

● Location: San Francisco, California

● Role/ Title: Inventor, Scientist, and Accessible Technology Strategist

● Achievement: Creator of #YouDescribe — the Descriptive Video Exchange (DVX), #WearABraille, the #BlindArduino Project, and Talking Tactile Pen

Tim Cordes, MD/PHD

● LinkedIn

● Location: Wisconsin–Madison

● Role/ Title: Doctor of Psychiatry and Professor

● Achievement: Second blind person to attend medical school in the USA.

Built software that translates complex organic molecules into sound for blind users.

Jennison Asunción

● LinkedIn

● Twitter

● Location: San Francisco Bay Area

● Role/ Title: Tech Leader at Linkedin

● Achievement: Founder of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) & many other disability initiatives.

Madison McCall

● LinkedIn

● Twitter

● Location: Raleigh, North Carolina

● Role/ Title: Founder of Illimitable

● Achievement: Illimitable is shining a spotlight on Disability through Technology, Entrepreneurship & Collaboration

Fredrik Larson

● LinkedIn

● Location: Uppsala, Sweden

● Role/ Title: Founder & CTO of ReadSpeaker

● Achievement: Created ReadSpeaker web software screen reader for blind users

Kyle Keane

● LinkedIn

● Location: Boston, MA

● Role/ Title: MIT Prof of Assistive Technology (AT)

● Achievement: Founder of Humanistic.app AT incubator and Human Co-Design Initiative (HCDI) AT workshops

Fernando Botelho

● LinkedIn

● Location: Curitiba Area, Brazil

● Role/ Title: Social Entrepreneur and Innovator

● Achievement: Creator of F123 lite — a Raspberry pi for blind, and screen reader for note taking

Mark Esho

● LinkedIn

● Twitter

● Website

● Location: Leicester, UK

● Role/ Title: Founder Access Rating CIC, Author of “I can, I will”

● Achievement: Access Rating is a mobile app to empower & provide disabled access review for easier accessibility for disabled persons.

Savyon Begun

● LinkedIn

● Instagram

● Location: Greater Boston Area

● Role/ Title:Industrial Designer at iRobot

● Achievement: Designed a smart cane for blind users to improve the navigation experience and to avoid obstacles using haptic feedback.

Tiffany Brar

● LinkedIn

● Twitter

● Location: Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India

● Role/ Title: Disability activist and accessibility evangelist

● Achievement: Creator of ‘Reaching the Unreached’, a program that helps blind teenagers with residential training and employment

Kristhian De Oliveira

● LinkedIn

● Location: Miami Metropolitan Area

● Role/ Title: Founder & CEO of Amicis

● Achievement: Creator of Amicis software — social media application for the disabled.

Larry Skutchan

● LinkedIn

● Twitter

● Location: Louisville, Kentucky Area

● Role/ Title: Director at American Printing House (APH)

● Achievement: Proposed a full-size QWERTY Bluetooth® keyboard combined with a 40-cell braille display, and many other blind tech

Natasha Mooney Walton

● LinkedIn

● Instagram

● Location: Denver, Colorado

● Role/ Title: Founder at Tech Disability Project

● Achievement: Tech Disability Project connects people with a disability that work in the tech industry

Sara Minkara

● LinkedIn

● Twitter

● Location: Boston, MA

● Role/ Title: Founder of Empowerment Through Integration

● Achievement: Created Empowerment Through Integration, a non-profit which aims to transform the stigma of disabilities globally

Ross Mason

● LinkedIn

● Location: Greater Atlanta Area

● Role/ Title: Founder of Healthcare Institute for National Renewal and Innovation (HINRI)

● Achievement: HINRI is a venture philanthropy that connects social entrepreneurs and innovators to sources of capital and other resources.

Debby Marchena

● LinkedIn

● Website

● Location: Amsterdam Area, Netherlands

● Role/ Title: Fine Art Artist and Teacher, print maker

● Achievement: Invented Marchena Lightup Cane, a smart cane for blind users that lights up at night so cars don’t hit blind people.

Feranmi Okanlami MD MS

● LinkedIn

● Website

● Location: University of Michigan

● Role/ Title:Physician, Disability Advocate.

● Achievement: Director of Adaptive Sports and Fitness, focused on attracting talented student-athletes with disabilities who seek to compete at events like the Paralympic Games.

Terri Bryant

● Website

● Location: New York

● Role/ Title: Founder of Guide Beauty, makeup artist

● Achievement: Parkinson’s disease causes her hands to shake with tremors, so she invented Guide Beauty makeup application tools, to help those with physical challenges

Meenakshi Das

● LinkedIn

● Website

● Location: Auburn, Alabama

● Role / Title: Cofounder of Working with Disabilities

●Achievement: Working with Disabilities focuses on sharing resources to US working professionals with a disability.

Diego Mariscal

● LinkedIn

● Website

● Location: Washington, DC

● Role / Title: Founder of Disability StartUP Network

● Achievement: Disability StartUP Network delivers entrepreneurship training to disabled Americans

Ed Summers

● LinkedIn

● Twitter

● Location: Cary, North Carolina

● Role / Title : Director of Accessibility at SAS Institute, Inc

● Achievement: Created Graphics Accelerator web software that
scans for graphs or charts and translates them into sound

Elizabeth Tikoyan

● LinkedIn

● Tiktok

● Role / Title: Founder of Riley App

● Accomplishments: Creator of Riley App, the social network for people with medical conditions and disabilities, aiming to change the stigma around disability.

Jane Adamé

● LinkedIn

● Location: Oakland, California

● Role / Title: Co-Inventor of Keela

● Accomplishments: Due to being affected by Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, she co-invented Keela / The Flex Cup, menstrual cup for women with limited mobility

Michael Hess

● LinkedIn

● Location: Denver, Colorado

● Role / Title: Founder of Blind Institute of Technology (BIT)

● Accomplishments: BIT places Blind and Visually Impaired individuals in career roles to be Astrophysicist, Sports Broadcaster, VP of Accessibility, Judge, Software Engineer, Travel Agent, CPA and much more!!

See our 2019 Global list of Disabled Innovators

Link Here

Think and Zoom — Promoting Disabled Innovators & Disability Innovations!

@thinkandzooom, @zubyonwuta

Think and Zoom Zuby Onwuta

#thinkandzoom #OpenAssistiveTech

#BlindInnovators #BlindTechInnovators#BlindTechUserInnovators #DisabledInnovators #DisabledTechInnovator #DisabledTechUserInnovators #thinkandzoom #SmartAssistiveTech #OpenAssistiveTech #inclusionrevolution #RepresentationMatters#makinganimpact #diversity #inclusion #disabilityawareness #disabilityemployment #disability #inclusive #accessibility#diversitymatters #inclusionmatters #disabilityrights#solveblindness #solvingblindness#solveforblind #solveDisability #solvefordisabled

Think and Zoom Future of Disability — Global list of Disabled Innovators was originally published in Tech Disability Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A common misconception about the word “disabled” is that it means “not able” or “less able”. In fact, the word was coined by disability activists to communicate that our population is disabled by the society we live in — not by our brains or bodies.

This concept sheds light on one reason why the disability employment rate is still only 29%. For the most part, the modern workplace has been designed without considering the needs of people working with disabilities. Disability inclusion involves reimagining our workplaces by centering the experiences of disabled employees.

Last year, Tech Disability Project published narratives by tech employees with disabilities who are on the front lines of creating disability inclusion for themselves and for others. For National Disability Employment Awareness Month 2019, we’re exploring the two main themes that emerged from these narratives: Disclosure and Accommodations.

Understanding Accommodations

Every employee with a disability, including chronic and mental illness, has the legal right to access reasonable accommodations at work. A reasonable accommodation is any change to the workplace, job or interview process that allows employees with disabilities to fulfill their professional responsibilities and access equal employment opportunities.

“It was a small ask, but it made a world of difference for me.” — Rachel Branch

Some disabled employees may already know what accommodations they need, particularly those who have experience managing a disability or those whose disabilities present consistently.

For others, the process of identifying accommodations may be a far more creative and complex process. Employees managing chronic or mental illness may need different accommodations over time or on different days. It may take time for folks who are in the process of seeking diagnosis or are newly disabled to determine what kinds of accommodations they need at work.

“Chronic illness is not a one-accommodation-and-you’re-done sort of issue…It adds layers of complexity because my accommodations need to change.” — Liz Allen

The majority of requested accommodations cost the employer nothing (such as the ability to work from home) and the average cost for the remainder of accommodations is only $500.

Accommodations bridge the gap between how disabled employees are expected to work and how we need to work. When we request accommodations, we are not expressing a preference but rather stating what we need in order to perform our duties at the expected level.

“I learned very quickly that when I didn’t need to agonize about looking productive, I got much more done much faster.” — Brianne Benness

The definition of an ideal work environment is different for everyone. Some employees love interacting with coworkers all day in a bustling office, while others need complete quiet and long stretches of personal time to focus. Some people like to work in a bright space while others need to work in the dark.

Not everyone thrives in an office environment; for many of us, remote work makes the most sense for our brains and bodies. At home, we can easily take rest breaks, we have more control over our environment, and we don’t have to spend additional energy commuting.

“At home, I feel empowered and in control of my schedule. Some days I can’t get out of bed, but I can (almost) always grab my laptop and hustle.” — Anonymous

For many of us, asking for accommodations is a difficult process. It may be the first time we are disclosing a disability at work, or the first time we are asking for what we truly need. Discussing private medical information in a professional setting can be emotionally taxing and confusing to navigate, particularly if we are speaking to someone who isn’t treating us with the sensitivity we deserve.

“It’s hard enough to disclose at work; it’s even harder to request accommodations and have them denied.” — Cakelin Marquardt

As meaningful and necessary as this legal protection is for our community, employers must acknowledge that employees with disabilities are required to do extra work in order to have the same access that our nondisabled counterparts have.

To share this labor with us, employers are encouraged to create an easy to navigate accommodations process and advertise it to prospective, new and existing employees. By training managers on the accommodations process, employees with disabilities will have more support when submitting requests. Employers that don’t doubt the validity of accommodation requests can take pride in how many employees they are enabling to do their best work.

“You may think that these types of daily adjustments aren’t afforded to you. If so, I urge you to reconsider.” — Madalyn Rose Parker

Key Takeaways for Employers:

1. Employees with disabilities have a legal right to access reasonable accommodations at work.

2. Determining what accommodations are required may be a creative and continually changing process.

3. Accommodation requests are not expressing a preference but rather a need.

4. Employers can support disabled employees by advertising the accommodations process, training managers and treating requests with integrity.

Natasha Walton writes about Diversity & Inclusion and disability representation. She founded Tech Disability Project and you can follow her work on Instagram.

Sign up for our mailing list to receive occasional updates.

And follow Tech Disability Project to stay up to date! ⬇

Accessing Accommodations at Work was originally published in Tech Disability Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In honor of National Disability Employment Awareness Month, Tech Disability Project and Adobe hosted Disability Connect on October 7, 2019. The evening included a 45-minute panel with Disability ERG Leaders as well as time for connecting.

Our panel included:
Govind Balakrishnan, VP Creative Cloud Product and Services and AccessAdobe Executive Sponsor (Adobe)
Srin Madipalli, Product Manager and Able@ Lead (Airbnb)
Iris McLeary, Software Engineer and Mixability Lead (Mixpanel)
Sunday Parker, Accessibility Outreach Program Manager and Global President of Abilityforce (Salesforce)
Natasha Walton, Founder of Tech Disability Project, Moderator

Watch the Video

Thanks to everyone who was able to attend Disability Connect, whether in person or via livestream! I’m looking forward to working with this community to continue growing our presence in the tech industry.

If you have any feedback on the event that you would like to share, please fill out this quick survey.

Full Transcript

Natasha Walton:
Hello everyone and welcome to Disability Connect. I’ll give you all just a minute to find your seats. My name is Natasha Walton and I am the founder of Tech Disability Project. About this time last year, we launched Tech Disability Project and this community came together online to share our stories about navigating our careers while managing a disability. This year the tech disability community is coming together to connect in person, as well as on a livestream, for the very first time. Please give yourself a round of applause for being part of this event and this community.

I’d also like to thank everyone who emailed in questions for our panelists. We’ve incorporated these topics into this evening’s discussion. So without further ado, let’s kick off our panel.

Hello everyone, thanks for being here. I’d love to start off — if you all could just introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about your company’s disability ERGs. Srin, do you want to kick us off?

Srin Madipalli:
Yep, sure. So, hello everyone. My name is Srin. I’m a product manager at Airbnb and I lead what is known as the in-home accessibility team. We are a team whose job it is to make travel easier for people with accessibility needs. I started there nearly two years ago after the company that I started, which was a travel company for people with disabilities, was acquired by Airbnb and I moved over from London to San Francisco to build out this new team and group. Very recently I became one of the co-chairs of Able@, which is Airbnb’s ERG group. We are currently in the process of organizing a lot of our global network into chapters. Today a lot of our work as been very San Francisco focused, but we are actively now trying to expand this in more programming in other offices, as Airbnb has expanded and scaled across the globe.

In terms of current initiatives, a lot are to do with accommodation policies, recruitment and raising awareness to other people within the company that we are a resource. Basically, the way me and my co-chairs describe what we’re doing, is to try and institutionalize our work at the moment. We’re moving from an ERG at a start up, where everything was quite informal, to now having everything more institutionalized as part of a global company.

Sunday Parker:
Hi. Can you hear me okay? All right, awesome. I don’t get my own mic because I’m not as important as Srin. (Laughs.) Hi, everyone. My name is Sunday Parker. I am from Salesforce and my day job is Accessibility Program Manager for our accessibility team under our user experience department within Product. I also am the global lead of our employee resource group, or as we call them at Salesforce, Equality Groups, called Abilityforce. So, we started as a grassroots initiative with a couple of employees back in 2016 and we’ve grown pretty tremendously over the last couple of years. Now we’re the fifth largest employee resource group at Salesforce with nearly four thousand members, which is pretty exciting. We tend to focus on a few different workstreams within accessibility at Salesforce, covering our events, real estate, and our product. So, we work really closely with those teams to work on closing some of the accessibility gaps as we find them and liaising with those teams to provide some consulting on accessibility.

Iris McLeary:
Hi, I’m Iris McLeary. I’m from Mixpanel and I am a software engineer and I just recently actually stepped down as co-lead of our Mixability group to take on a new role on our brand new diversity council to lead company level, business aligned initiatives around diversity. My Mixability co-lead is around here somewhere. So, when I joined Mixpanel almost a year and a half ago, the ERG program had just gotten started. There were five groups and when I was signing up, I signed up for Mixability and they told me no one else had signed up yet. Boom, I’m the lead, and over the past year and a half we have gone from that, to being the most visible presence, at least in the San Francisco office, having our sign up all over the place on resources we’ve provided, and focusing very much on the idea of universal accessibility, that we all bring something different to work and we all need different accommodations to do our best and everyone deserves access to that.

Govind Balakrishnan:
Hello everyone. My name is Govind Balakrishnan. I am from Adobe and I head up product and engineering for the Creative Cloud business. I’ve been here for a very long time. I was actually just talking to a couple of people here. I’ve been in this neighborhood for roughly 18 years. I worked at Macromedia which was acquired by Adobe and I’ve sort of been in this neighborhood, been around all these buildings here for the past 18 years. I’ve truly enjoyed my time here but for the past year and a half or so, I’ve also taken on the role of an Executive Sponsor for the Adobe Access network, which was actually set up by Natasha a few years back when she was part of Adobe. I’m not sure if we have done justice to it but we are definitely trying our best. Sucheta, who is back there, she has been spear heading a lot of the work that we do around accessibility both here in San Francisco and in our San Jose office. We have branches of this network in every one of our locations.

We have very diverse expectations from this network. We try hard to make the workplace more accessible but we also try to give back to the community to the extent possible and look for ways to make our products more accessible. I can speak to it more as we get into the panel discussion but I’m super excited to be here, super excited to have all of you here, and thank you for organizing this and inviting me to speak here.

Natasha Walton:
Thanks to each of you. It’s great to have you here. Though July is Disability Pride Month, within the work place each October we honor National Disability Employment Awareness Month. The disability employment rate in the US is still only 29% compared with the 75% employment rate for non-disabled people. With that in mind, why is it important for tech companies to prioritize disability hiring and inclusion? Govind, would you like to kick us off?

Govind Balakrishnan:
Yeah. I think at some level a lot of it starts with the number of users that we have for our products. If you think about the statistics around people with disabilities, roughly 15% of the global population has some sort of disability, and as a product leader in a company, as you’re looking to broaden your gaze, it is important to find ways to make sure that you have products and you build products that address the needs of your broader user base. And if you can do that by also insuring that you have the right kind of people, who are experiencing some of the pain with our products, helping to build the products, helping formulate what the product should look like, what it should feel like, then you get to a great place because you have win-win situation there. Because at some level you have found ways to engage with the community, bring them into the fold, help them formulate and build the products, that can then be used by the community. I think that’s a win-win situation for everyone, and it’s something that I really value and hold true,

toadvocate for ways to bring more of that culture within Adobe.
We’re trying to find ways to engage with the community through various means. It can feel… When you walked in you probably saw the Project Hired table that was set up outside. We engaged actively with them a couple of months back, where we invited them for a job fair within Adobe San Jose office where we engaged with the community, tried to understand how we could help them gain employment, either at Adobe or other places, and found ways to train them with some of our tools and make them more employable across other parts of the tech industry. So, all in all it has been a very very symbiotic experience, where we have found a way to work with the community, to help the community and have the community help us build better products.

Iris McLeary:
Yeah, building off of that, there is a huge pool of relatively untapped talent and if you can be the company that brings these people in and actually makes them feel welcome, provides the accommodations they need to be able to do their best work, that is a talent pool you just tapped that no one else has and it’s a talent pool that brings very diverse experiences to the table and so it can be… We have a sales engineer who’s partially color blind and unfortunately has had to be the watchdog for red/green color blindness accessibility in our product because he’ll just go around filing product tickets every time he can’t use it. And that’s kind of an annoying position to be in as the only employee whose doing that, but I am so glad we have him, because I’ll see a new design come up and I’m like “Come here a second. Can you just comment on this? Can you see this? That’s what I thought, okay.”

Sunday Parker:
So, I think the tech industry really has a moral obligation to get things right and to do better. I guess I’m going to date myself a little bit here, but the Americans with Disabilities Act predates me, and so I, in theory, should have never lived a day in my life facing any kind of discrimination. We all know that’s not true and I am paying for the mistakes of architects and designers who did really bad things for a very long time and made a really inaccessible world. And this is really unique opportunity for us to do better and we really have no excuses. We are creating digital products and a platform in an age where we know what we need to do. We need to be inclusive to people with disabilities and bring people with disabilities to the table and think about it throughout the thought process. We talked a lot about users with disabilities, you know, people with disabilities are the largest minority, so, we are really missing an opportunity to reach all of those users when we’re not thinking about accessibility and disability inclusion.

Srin Madipalli:
I don’t have a huge amount more to add but I think the key thing is, yeah, it’s about tapping a pool of talent that I think is often overlooked and is not maximizing on such great opportunities in that and I think as Sunday mentioned, the tech industry has incredible power and influence in the world at the moment and as that classic Spider Man… With power comes responsibility. I think it can’t be denied, right? The level of influence that we as an industry have, I think we can also have a huge amount of positive impact if we get things right.

Natasha Walton:
Agreed. Thanks for that. Sunday, in a recent article in Diverseability Magazine, you shared that Salesforce has a long range plan to become a best place to work for people with disabilities. What could you share with us about that plan?

Sunday Parker:
Yeah, so it’s actually really exciting. Last week was probably the most exciting week of my career, really. A project that we’ve been working on for several years, which started with Abilityforce, our Employee Resource Group, is to really create a formalized plan for accessibility across the company and how we’re going to really focus on those different initiatives. So, we, just last week, coinciding with National Disability Employment Awareness Month, have announced the Office of Accessibility, which we have three open positions currently open, including a director role, a manager of compliance, and workforce development manager. So, if anyone is interested feel free to look that up on our career site, just by looking up accessibility. This is really exciting because this really started as the grassroots side of working on accessibility from the company from the ground up and now we’ve really expanded to leadership adoption. So, as we look to become one of the best work places for people with disabilities, this is really the start of that process and creating formal office and it’s really going to give us an opportunity to focus on accessibility.

Natasha Walton:
That’s so fantastic to hear. Srin, you’re spearheading the efforts at Airbnb to make travel more accessible for everyone. What’s your strategy for driving change within the Airbnb ecosystem?

Srin Madipalli:
Yeah, great question but I think it comes from a multitude of avenues. I think one is being a product team and a business center within the company, does give us a lot of… It does give us an influential position to advocate across the company and across the host and guest communities at Airbnb. So, we make product changes to make travel easier and those changes cascade through the network and the ecosystem. That is the first bit. And then the second, we have tried to build our team as a center of expertise and know-how, to even maybe slightly outside of our domain as a product and business unit. We do a lot of work to help educate other teams within Airbnb, help get them excited about our work, help get them socialized into the opportunities that are there, how they can learn more, and how they can evangelize within their teams. So, it’s a mixture of just building things and making something better to use than when previously it was not great, to actually fixing some of the table stakes stuff…how do we get everybody excited and motivated about this work?

That actually… it takes time and especially when the organization is as large as it is now. Yeah, it’s definitely a work in progress, but in the last eighteen months, two years, since our team was launched we’ve been able to get a lot of the company really aligned and excited about this area.

Natasha Walton:
Congratulations. That’s great. Iris, you were the first person at Mixpanel to express interest in starting a disability ERG, as you mentioned. Why did you choose to disclose your disability status upon joining your company and how has that decision impacted your work?

Iris McLeary:
I spent five months between my previous job and my current job recovering and processing. I lost my previous job for performance reasons and I spent five months recovering, and while there are things that could have been handled a lot better on the employer’s side, I realized that part of it was that I felt like I could not be fully myself at work during those final few months. There were things going on in my life that were impacting me very deeply that I just could not talk about. And there were things that the people who were evaluating me didn’t know and couldn’t have known.

That was a really tough realization and over those five months, as I was getting ready to start actually job searching again, I realized that I didn’t want to feel like that anymore and I didn’t want to go through that again and one of my non-negotiables moving forward, in addition to the fact that I’m covered in tattoos and more likely to show up wearing a punk shirt than a button down…and I swear like a sailor at work honestly. But one of my non-negotiables is that I’m mentally ill, twice over. It just is a thing about me and it’s not a thing I’m going to keep my mouth shut about. And I need accommodations, and they’re not something I would have asked for in the past, but it has made all the difference in the world. For the people around me to know, for the people who are managing me to know, for everyone up to our executives to know. And to see that sometimes I’m showing up to work when I don’t have a whole lot to give, and they can still appreciate that that is what I’m doing, and that I’m giving what I have to give, and I’m taking care of myself, so that tomorrow I will still have something to give.

Watching that percolate outward through the company, both as something that a lot of people already acknowledged but didn’t necessarily talk about, and as something that more and more people are becoming aware of. That we’re all just showing up and doing our best. That has been incredibly powerful to make it a safe space for me to show up to every single day.

Natasha Walton:
That’s incredibly powerful, thank you for sharing with us. Govind, you’re the Executive Sponsor for AccessAdobe. Could you tell us more about the important role of that executive sponsors can play in increasing access for both employees and customers?

Govind Balakrishnan:
Yeah, sure. One of the tenants that I hold true to as a leader is, that if you can, as a leader, create a safe environment where everyone can be themselves, everyone is confident that they are treated with respect, and will treat others the way they would like to be treated, where they feel confident with expressing their ideas freely, and more importantly, expressing themselves freely, and being supported along the way, then, in more ways than one, in every sense of the word, it translates to them doing their best work. And I think the onus is on all of us to ensure that we provide that environment wherever you work. Taking that a step further, I felt like it was an opportunity when Sucheta contacted me and asked me if I could lead this network within Adobe. I felt like I had an opportunity to make that real for a larger group of people, even people outside my own team. That, in more ways than one, is how I started contributing to the Adobe Access network.

I started off by saying at some level we have to try to find a way to drive more awareness and empathy within the company. It’s starts with that. When there’s more empathy, when there’s more awareness, people tend to be more accepting, and then we can talk about how we make our workplace more accessible and more approachable. And that’s easier said than done. I was mentioning to someone a few minutes back that the plates that we have in this cafeteria were found to be very heavy for certain people with certain forms of illnesses or disabilities. How do you fix that? How do you address that? The stairways, the elevators, the bathrooms, all of that, how do you make it so they are more accessible?

Then we can talk about our products and how we make them more accessible and approachable to a broader audience, people who are colorblind, and this is something that we tend to forget all the time. I often get emails from people saying “My changes are in green.” But what if that goes to a person who is colorblind? There is no concept of green. So, how do you make it so that everyone in the organization is always thinking about how they make the products that they build more approachable, more accessible, to everyone? Lastly, one of the things that we have tried really hard to focus on is to work with the community, and I touched on this earlier, but work with the community to make them more employable, help them use our tools, help them tap into their creativity. Adobe is a creative company. How can we share our tools with a larger audience of people to help them express their creativity in ways that they probably couldn’t? Maybe our products were too hard to use. What if we could try to help them learn how to use our products so that they can find avenues to express their creativity more seamlessly and easily?

So, those are some of the things that I’ve held to, that I’ve tried to push forward with, obviously, help from a number of people within Adobe, Sucheta being one of them, and I think it’s something that I’d really like to see more of across the industry.

Natasha Walton:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). That’s awesome to hear about a product leader being so connected to the agenda of people with disabilities. Sunday, folks with disabilities often wonder how, when, and whether to disclose their disability status at work or during the interview process. What advice to you have when it comes to disclosing a disability in a professional context, whether as an interviewee or an employee?

Sunday Parker:
Yeah, I’m happy to share my own experience and if you are a person with a disability and you have this question I would recommend getting the perspective of some other folks who have been down this path. I’m happy to share my own advice and the way I’ve approached it, and that has changed over time as I’ve interviewed at different companies, but in the initial interview process, I do not need any accommodations, so I typically do not disclose my disability. Whether it be a phone interview or Skype interview, it’s just not necessary for me to disclose that information. But I think if you are a person that needs an accommodation from the start, I think it’s best for you to be open and up front about that from the beginning, because that’s really going to set you up for success in the interview process. I have been on receiving end of emails with folks who have… recruiters and such, who have reached out to me because they have a candidate that disclosed they were in a wheelchair and they asked me what advice I have to make them most successful in the process. And we have FAQs and best practices to help them.

So, that time, I think it was really helpful that that candidate did disclose, because while I would hope that every single recruiter that we have at the company would provide an amazing experience for candidates with disabilities, I think it’s still best that we do know about it so we can set them up for success. One of the things I have done is, when doing an on site interview, I have let the person know that I’m meeting that I am in a wheelchair, and that’s mostly because, you know, just in case they book a conference room with a higher table, or just a smaller space, they can rethink that and plan accordingly. Though, I have showed up on site not disclosing my disability before, and it’s gone okay as well. So, I think that’s something that is completely up to the individual and what you’re comfortable with. I will say, I think it’s better to disclose just so that person is aware because I think it kind of takes the stress off of your shoulder as a candidate to have to think about one thing less.

Particularly, about accommodations, I in the past have accepted a job offer without requesting any accommodations. And when I did come on Day 1, I then asked for those accommodations and did not receive them. So, what I did, starting with Salesforce, and what I will do in the rest of my career, is I will never sign a job offer until I have written conformation that that company will honor my reasonable accommodations. And I get that in writing as well.

Natasha Walton:
Thanks for that. That’s really important. Srin, when the company you founded was acquired by Airbnb, you relocated from London to San Francisco. What are some differences between how the government upscales people with disabilities in the UK versus the US, and what changes would you like to see here in San Francisco?

Srin Madipalli:
Yeah, sure. When I came over here it was one of the biggest surprises for me. Growing up in the UK, in Europe, it is very much a different system where there is a greater degree of government intervention and support at all levels. So, for instance, let’s say, if you have a disability, and you can’t use public transport to get to the office, the government will pay for you to have a taxi to and from the office every day. The biggest one for me is my care support. So, for folks with disabilities, like me, who are dependent on round the clock care and nursing support, and again for most of my life this was provided by the state, free of charge, not in-contested and so all the additional costs of having a disability were not born by me or my employer. Those costs were born by the government, basically.

So, when I was moving over to the US, it was a surprise to me that there wasn’t any real level of support in terms of the financial assistance that I guess I’d been spoiled on to be frank, and got quite used to. And I think that is a bigger question that I noticed, that in the US people don’t talk about, is actually less about accommodations, ADA, and everything…but how do you get the state to actually invest in people? And I think unless you have that systemic foundation of investment in people, it is very difficult to upscale into getting them into a role, because my biggest worry is, all of the companies here today, we may have the most inclusive, amazing, fair employment policies, but if people with disabilities are not in a position where they can get out of bed in the morning to go and learn, get educated, learn skills, have some transport to get into the office in the morning, I feel that is a great worry for me. Even just little things. You look at the sidewalks on Brannan Street, they are in absolutely atrocious condition. I have a fellow wheelchair user on my team, a wheel got stuck in a curb because there’s a massive pothole in it.

So, these are nothing to do with companies… These are foundational, civic, state based issues that I feel, if those are not fixed, it always is going to be a limiting factor to what we as ERGs and companies can do in the first place.

Natasha Walton:
Absolutely. There’s certainly a lot of different forces at play. Iris, working in the tech industry can be extremely demanding. Some company cultures encourage employees to push their bodies and brains beyond their limit. What does it look like for tech companies to be more inclusive, particularly when it comes to employees with chronic and mental illness?

Iris McLeary:
I was folding my laundry today and I actually ran across a shirt that references a meeting that is the perfect example of how to be more inclusive. Literally, my third day at the company was what has come to be known as the infamous offsite in our engineering product and design organization, where we pulled this huge organizational cultural pivot that would kind of engineer ourselves into a deep dark hole priority wise and out of it came, our then VP of Engineering, now VP of Product, Neil, saying we needed to move forward with “max power”.

I remember when he said this he was very careful to say literally in the next sentence, “This does not mean we are working until 3 am. This does not mean that we are working weekends. Unless you like working Saturdays instead of Mondays, in which case, be my guest. It means that when we are at work, this is where our focus is going. This is where our energy is going.”

In that moment, the fact that he took the time to realize how that directive might have been interpreted by some people, and walk that back and say, “No, this doesn’t mean that we are pulling all nighters, in fact I want you to do the opposite, because the worst thing we can do right now is burnout so early in this new initiative. I don’t want any of you to burn out. You give what you have to give, but you give it this direction now and we make a concerted effort in this direction.”

I think having a VP level executive make that very clear and make very clear that he values us taking care of ourselves and that no one should be working beyond their capabilities is huge piece of what it takes.

To dial back that culture, and, yeah, we have people that submit things at three in the morning. They are no where near the majority of the engineering workforce, and it’s a choice. They’re also usually showing up to work at like, eleven or noon. That’s just how they work, and that’s totally okay. It’s not that you can’t do things late at night. It’s also not that you have to do things late at night. And making that very very explicit from the highest levels on down is what it takes.

Natasha Walton:
That’s cool to hear about the level of personalization that employees are empowered to be able to craft with their employer. Thanks Iris. Govind, last year, research by Accenture, Disability:IN and the American Association of People with Disabilities revealed that disability hiring and inclusion has a positive impact on share holder returns. How should executives be thinking about the importance of disability hiring and increasing access at their companies?

Govind Balakrishnan:
I think this goes back to that fact that roughly one in six humans in the world has some form of disability, and if companies don’t take the time and effort to ensure that their products, their resources, meet the needs of that group of people, then it’s their loss, and I say shame on them. The sad part is most companies take way long to realize that, and take very long to take steps to address the gaps in their product or service portfolio. In sitting here today, hearing some of the comments that we have heard, it’s great to see that many of the companies that are represented here have taken steps or are taking active steps in that direction, but if you look across the tech industry, or even the broader industry, you’ll see that that’s not really true, because they don’t think about that largely untapped potential market.

So, I think there’s a huge value there, but I go back to, to do that right you have to make sure that you’re also working with the community, bringing the community in to work with you, hand in hand, to make sure that those products and services that are being built are being built right. That’s the second part that I think most companies and execs in the companies tend to forget, because they think that, and this holds true for any type of diversity and inclusion, they think that they can build products and services without necessarily having the right representation, the right diverse representation, within the room where the decisions are being made, where product decisions are being made. And that I feel is a fallacy in most situations, and when companies realize their fallacy, I think they start addressing those untapped potentials, and they actually start increasing diversity. So, I think that’s a huge opportunity for most companies.

Natasha Walton:
That’s a beautiful summary of the importance of diversity and inclusion in general. Thank you.

Well, I’ve got one final question for all of you. In your opinion what does a fully accessible workplace of the future look like? Srin, why don’t you kick us off?

Srin Madipalli:
Wow, great question. So, I think it is something that has been designed and created with the insights and input of people with disabilities in mind. It is an office place where all of these things have been baked in from the beginning, rather than something that has been retrofitted. And it is also something where if changes are needed, modifications are made, there are systems of funding and support in place to accommodate those employees in one way or another.

Sunday Parker:
Yeah, I think the pessimist in me is like, the answer to that doesn’t really exist. But, to build off of Srin, said perfectly — not everything is going to be fully accessible. It is really very challenging to create something that is truly universally accessible to everyone. There’s always going to be that need for accommodation. The one thing that companies can do better and get right is to build in that framework of accessibility and to think about how you make those modifications, and work with employees and customers with disabilities to meet them where they are. In addition to that, just having people at the table, and we talk a lot about how executive leadership is lacking diversity, well, when it comes to people with disabilities, we are not at the table at any level. I think we need to, of course, be at the leadership side in making those decisions and being included, but we also just need to have more people with disabilities in the workforce contributing their ideas.

Iris McLeary:
The first hurdle we need to overcome, especially in the United States, is definitely just basic physical accessibility. We’re in a world where the person who owns the building has no incentive to fix accessibility unless there’s a lawsuit involved, and no matter what the tenant feels is right, or what the tenant wants to do, they may not be able to fund it themselves, without triggering millions of dollars of code upgrades they can’t pay for. My company may currently be stuck in one of these annoying double binds, where we really want something to be accessible, but we literally cannot do it ourselves because we don’t own the building, and a truly accessible space has just the basic physically accessibility stuff taken care of. You can get into and out of the building, you can get between floors, you can get into all the rooms, and then beyond that, it’s flexibility. Maybe open office works great for someone, it is completely non-workable for someone else. You need access to, or at least the option to access, whatever would be possible for you to do your job and having that kind of flexible structure built in, I think, is what would make a work place truly accessible.

Govind Balakrishnan:
Yeah, I’m not sure there’s much more to add. I think you’ve all said a lot I completely agree with. Maybe one thing that I can add is, what would be really nice, if I were to look ahead, is for more empathy amongst people in the workplace. Yes, you can make your facilities, the buildings, the everything more accessible, no doubt, and you should, we should, we should all strive to do that, but at the end of the day there is a human element that I think gets forgotten, be it that there’s… having representatives at the table, as Sunday mentioned, or as Iris mentioned earlier, having people just recognize that not everyone is ready to operate at 100% or 200% every day. And just be accepting of that and recognize that, yes, you may not be at 100% today but how do we support you so that you’re back at 100% tomorrow or day after? Having that level of empathy, and making that front and center, and driving that awareness, around that empathy would be, I think, be the most magical thing that can happen from a workplace point of view. Not to take anything away from all the other things that have been said, but from my point of view, if we as humans across the globe can demonstrate that empathy, I feel like we’ll be in a far, far better place.

Natasha Walton:
I saw a lot of heads nodding along with each of those statements. It’s really exciting to think about creating that workplace together. Well, big thanks to each of you, not only for participating this evening and sharing all of this wisdom and experience, but for what you all do every day in your jobs for advocating for this community. We’re so thankful to have these champions, and all the folks here at this event, who are creating visibility for folks with disabilities in tech. So let’s please give our panelists a round of applause. I’d just also like to extend a very big thank you to Adobe for hosting us, particularly Sucheta, who has been mentioned. See put in an incredible amount of work to make this evening possible. Lindsay and Sheridan as well for doing ASL interpretation for us, and Interpreter Now, who’s the agency that we worked with.

Disability Connect Panel: Recap and Transcript was originally published in Tech Disability Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Though one in four adults experience disability in the US, the employment rate of people with disabilities is only 29%. This staggering statistic begs the question: Why is such a large swath of the population currently excluded from the workforce?

Last year, disabled tech employees from across the industry and around the globe shared their career stories as part of Tech Disability Project. As we seek to understand what disability inclusion looks like and how we can increase disability employment, it’s important to start with the real life experiences of people with disabilities.

The narratives shared on Tech Disability Project convey the resilience, creativity and courage that these individuals bring to their jobs day in and day out. But we also hear about the many ways in which workplace norms, accommodation processes, and management practices either create access — or create barriers to access — for disabled employees on a daily basis.

Two main themes about disability inclusion emerged: Disclosure and Accommodations. For Disability Employment Awareness Month 2019, we’ll explore both of these themes.

The Importance of Disclosure

Disclosing a disability at work means sharing your disability status — with a manager, the HR department, your team or publicly with your company. Deciding whether or not to disclose, how much to disclose and when to disclose to an employer (or potential employer) are personal decisions that disabled employees must make. The visibility of one’s disability may impact these decisions.

“I made this mistake for years — I assumed that if people knew about my disability, they wouldn’t take me as seriously at work. But I’ve learned that it’s better if they know.” — Iris McLeary

Some employees with disabilities choose to disclose to their HR department and manager in order to access accommodations that will help them do their job, such as a modified schedule, additional desk equipment or accessible software. (Our next post will further explore Accommodations.)

Some choose to disclose to their teammates for social or interpersonal reasons. Disclosure provides context for access needs that arise, such as taking the elevator instead of the stairs, pair programing to give an injury a break, or avoiding a particular restaurant due to a food allergy. When employees feel safe enough to share their access needs at work it can increase a sense of inclusion and belonging.

“I started sharing my story at first for self-preservation, because it helped me accept my own reality. People can’t support you if they don’t know what is going on or what you need.” — Rachel Branch

Other disabled employees may choose to disclose a disability at work because they view it as part of their identity. Many of us are proud to be disabled and consider the ways our brains and bodies work to be a central part of who we are.

Unfortunately, not every workplace is currently safe enough for employees with disabilities to disclose. Our community faces stigma, bias, and a lack of understanding about disability, making many of us feel like disclosing at work isn’t an option.

“The biggest challenge is how few people I can tell without jeopardizing my career.” — Anonymous

Only 21% of office workers with disabilities choose to disclose at work. The fear of losing a job or being treated differently due to disability status is a real consideration for many in our community.

Employees with disabilities who don’t feel safe enough to disclose at work
are not only denied their legal right to accommodations, but have to expend additional effort during the workday to hide a part of their identity, known as “covering”.

“As excited as I am to join other disabled tech employees in sharing my story for Tech Disability Project, even writing this article is a risk for my career.” — Cakelin Marquardt

It’s vitally important that employers proactively communicate their commitment to hiring and supporting people with disabilities. This could look like initiating a disability employee resource group, creating hiring initiatives for people with disabilities or training managers about the accommodations process.

“In an ideal world, anyone would be able to disclose a disability or illness when starting a new job in order to set and manage expectations.” — Sam Huntington

Key Takeaways for Employers:

1. The majority of office workers with disabilities don’t feel safe enough to disclose their disability status at work.

2. A lack of disclosure precludes eligible individuals from accessing reasonable accommodations and creates the extra burden of “covering” their disabilities at work.

3. Employers can create more safety for employees to disclose by publicly advertising their commitment to hiring and supporting employees with disabilities.

4. When business leaders with disabilities disclose publicly within their companies, they help to reduce stigma and shift the culture. Representation matters.

Read Next: Accessing Accommodations at Work

Natasha Walton writes about Diversity & Inclusion and disability representation. She founded Tech Disability Project and you can follow her work on Instagram.

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Disclosing a Disability at Work was originally published in Tech Disability Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As we know from the tech employees with disabilities who shared their stories last October in Tech Disability Project, the modern workplace and business culture presents many accessibility obstacles to people working with disability, injury and illness.

As we continue to work with employers to build inclusive work environments that accommodate our needs, schedules and working styles, here are a number of resources that may be helpful to employees and job seekers as we manage our disabilities alongside our careers.

Communities

Disabled Techies Slack Group
Diversability Facebook Group

Conferences

confa11y: List of accommodating technology conferences
Tech Inclusion

Support Resources

Job Accommodation Network: Guidance on workplace accommodations and disability employment issues
Chronically Capable: Flexible jobs for the chronically ill
AbleThrive: Aggregated support resources for people with disabilities

Talks

The Business Case for Disability Inclusion at 2019 World Economic Forum
2018 Disability Allyship Forum: Advocating for Abilities by Jessie Wusthoff
Discussing Disability in the Workplace by Natasha Walton

Research & Articles

The Disability Inclusion Advantage 2018 research report by Disability:IN, Accenture and APPD
2018 Annual Disability Statistics Compendium by Institute on Disability
Disability Writing & Journalism Guidelines by Center for Disability Rights

If there are any additional relevant resources that you’d like to share with our community, please email techdisabilityproject at gmail.com. Thanks!

Communities, Resources and Research for Tech Employees with Disabilities was originally published in Tech Disability Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For over a year, my answer to this question was that I was on long term disability. But when it comes to disclosing a disability, invisibly disabled people like myself need to decide how much to share. Do I present myself authentically? Or do I protect my ability to return to work in the future?

As excited as I am to join other disabled tech employees in sharing my story for Tech Disability Project, even writing this article is a risk for my career.

Though I grew up with sick parents, it took me many years to acknowledge my own illness. Accepting and understanding my disability is an ongoing process. I don’t expect others to make that journey in the span of a short conversation.

I am an assault and abuse survivor with PTSD. Due to genetics and the correlation of childhood trauma with inflammation, I also have autoimmune disease (spondyloarthropathy, colitis) and a connective tissue disorder. The systems I need to navigate as a disabled person are akin to managing additional illnesses.

The American healthcare system is unique among industrialized nations in that health insurance is tied to employment. This reality traps disabled people in jobs where they experience discrimination or don’t have access to accommodations.

Advances in our careers must be carefully balanced with healthcare, financial and accessibility needs.

I am no exception. The TNF alpha inhibitor injections that prevent my vertebrae from fusing cost $5,000 each month. If I switch healthcare plans, it could mean paying for these injections out of pocket or losing access to one or more of my providers. These fears are with the current protections for pre-existing conditions.

Over the past 2 years, my anxiety about access to healthcare worsened as I watched a possible Affordable Care Act repeal unfold on the national stage. I was unsuccessfully trying to balance advocacy with a job that was not fulfilling my need for impact or personal growth. It became hard for me to concentrate at work. I worried that being open about my experiences might confirm negative stereotypes about disabled people and female software developers. I decided to take medical leave to focus on my health.

It’s hard enough to disclose at work; it’s even harder to request accommodations and have them denied. The most frequent response I’ve received upon requesting accommodations is that it would be unfair to other employees. If I’m the only person with a private, quiet space and a standing desk, that just wouldn’t be fair. (It’s also not fair to find out you have an incurable genetic disorder at 22 years old.)

While working at a tech company that provided flexible schedules and unlimited PTO, I told my boss that I may need to come in late on certain mornings due to health issues. Though he was supportive in that initial conversation, the very next week he got upset with me for arriving at 9:15 AM. It’s difficult to open up about health issues at work only to have inconsistent workplace policies that interfere with handling them.

It’s not always disability itself, but societal constructs that make being disabled so challenging.

Given the career consequences for being openly disabled, I have yet to meet a disabled role model or mentor in tech. How can we build accessible and inclusive tech companies without talking about the real issues that affect us?

We could start by normalizing the disclosure of disability. It’s not always disability itself, but societal constructs that make being disabled so challenging. Non-disabled people are often surprised to learn that I might not always need my service dog or that many wheelchair users can walk. Disability policing — and the corresponding fear of “faking it” — not only hurts invisibly disabled and chronically ill employees, but anyone who experiences sickness or personal challenges.

Valuing career advancement above health causes many people to pursue or tolerate harmful work environments. This is certainly the case for many of us working in the hostile and competitive world of tech. Despite the legendary benefits, the tech industry has some of the highest rates of burnout and turnover.

I wish more employers would see the benefits of hiring disabled people and creating a transparent, compassionate company culture. Disabled people have played crucial roles in bringing touch screens and the internet into existence. Yet the popular narrative is that we are only the recipients of innovative technology.

I often find efficient shortcuts or see problems differently than my non-disabled coworkers. Generosity and kindness are close values because they have been essential to my survival. Being part of the disabled community has expanded my empathy for diverse users. And advocating for myself has taught me how to advocate for others.

Letting go of silence has transformed my shame into connection.

As I’ve become more comfortable disclosing, more often than not, the person I’m speaking with will share their own stories of disability or health challenges. Understanding my struggle as a universal experience helps me to integrate the collective pain of family, friends and people I’ve never even met. For me, letting go of silence has transformed my shame into connection.

So many of us hide our struggles to protect our careers. Claiming my disability and chronic illness has shown me the possibility of a more compassionate and productive tech industry. Through vulnerability and reimagining the definition of a valuable employee, I hope to expand possibilities for everyone.

Read Next: My Own Worst Enemy is the Heckler in My Mind

Kaitlin (Cakelin) Marquardt is a Full Stack Software Engineer at Polco, a civic engagement platform for local government and advocacy groups. She is also a scientist committed to helping individuals who’ve experienced trauma and an advocate for diversity and inclusion in tech. Franklin is a retired greyhound and Cakelin’s service dog.

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The Gift of Grey Spaces in Our Careers was originally published in Tech Disability Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Describe your day-to-day experience of managing a mental illness at work.

I have a long history with depression and anxiety, with many ups and downs throughout. Some days are better than others, but even on the best day my mental illness informs my actions and decisions. It’s like a voice in the back of my head, a heckler in the crowd telling me I’m not good enough, smart enough, productive enough.

Hell, right now the heckler is telling me:

You have no business thinking you have something useful to contribute to this project. You’re average, you’re boring, you’re not a good writer.

I try to push through, get out of bed in the morning, catch the bus, go to work, write the article, do the work. Some days, just moving is like breathing underwater. Some days I’m fine. But sometimes I lose the fight and have to stay home.

Once I’ve reached the decision to stay home, the heckler speaks up again:

You can’t call in sick, you’re not really sick. You’re just lazy and pathetic. They’ll fire you if they find out you’re lying.

But I am sick. This has been one of the hardest things for me to learn. Mental illness is an illness like a cold is an illness. It may not be contagious and it may be invisible most of the time, but it’s still an illness that needs to be treated with rest and medication.

What strategies do you use to manage your mental illness during the workday?

If I am working on a bad mental health day, there are a variety of ways I can manage my health while still being productive.

1. Music is a must. Every morning I put my music library on shuffle and listen throughout my commute and workday. It’s a lot harder to hear the heckler when I’m listening to something that makes me happy. Music helps me focus on my work and connect with my feelings in a healthy way.
2. Space to myself. If I am having a particularly challenging day, I will find a comfortable, quiet place to sit by myself, preferably with natural light. This helps me feel more relaxed; with fewer external distractions I feel more rested and less easily overwhelmed.
3. Pacing myself and knowing my limits. When I’m feeling up to it, I may spend most of my day on a single large project at work. To break up the day into manageable chunks, I always make time to read an article or watch a funny video on YouTube. If I’m having a bad mental health day, it’s easier to work on several lighter projects. When I feel stressed or overwhelmed, I take a break or walk around the block to get out of a negative headspace.

What has been your experience with disclosing your mental illness at work?

Until recently, I chose not to disclose my mental illness to professional contacts (especially managers) for fear of being judged. Publishing this article is a big step for me in becoming more comfortable sharing my disability with others.

I feared that if I disclosed I would be treated like a child — an experience I had throughout school — or simply fired. One of the heckler’s constant refrains is that if people knew what I was really like inside, they would think I was crazy, incapable, weak, unproductive, and more.

At my last job, when I disclosed my mental illness to my manager after taking a couple of sick days, she started treating me differently — and not in a good way. My requests to take sick days or to work from home were met with disdain and eye rolls. I was talked down to and berated in front of my coworkers when I didn’t meet unspoken expectations.

I am happy to say that I have had a different experience with my current company. When I disclosed my mental illness to my manager a couple of months after starting, he responded with sympathy and understanding. He even encouraged me to use sick time for bad mental health days instead of wasting vacation time. He recognizes that mental illness is an illness and treats it as such. I am grateful to have the opportunity to work from home or take a sick day when I know that I will be unable to be productive in the workplace.

In an ideal world, anyone would be able to disclose a disability or illness when starting a new job in order to set and manage expectations. And in an ideal world, that conversation would always be met with understanding. This isn’t always the case today, but as we work to curb the social stigma of disability, hopefully one day it will be.

Read Next: A Vision for Digital Equality

Samantha Huntington is a technical writer at Mixpanel in San Francisco. She has struggled with debilitating anxiety and depression since childhood. She is happy to say that with therapy and medication, she is feeling better than ever before. When not at work, she can be found binge-watching TV with her cat or out at a concert with friends.

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My Own Worst Enemy is the Heckler in My Mind was originally published in Tech Disability Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I was diagnosed with a genetic disorder called Retinitis Pigmentosa at the age of 16 — almost 16 years ago. Doctors indicated that my vision would begin to gradually decline and I may eventually become completely blind. Within a couple of years, everything happened exactly as the doctors predicted.

Being a teenaged cricket enthusiast, I was unable to throw the cricket ball into the stumps or send the ball over ropes as a batsman. In India, cricket is another religion and I had to forcefully keep myself away because of my limited vision.

Education was another challenge. Being in a middle-class family, studies were of the utmost importance. Seeing the blackboard and reading the textbooks gradually became impossible for me. Nevertheless, I worked hard to clear graduation with the help of friends and family.

Even now, in 2018, not every person with a disability has the opportunity to pursue their dream career. More than a decade back, when I was first searching for career opportunities, my ambitions were much larger than the choices available to me. But I needed to find some work to buy my daily bread.

I believe my greatest asset is my confidence. Though I initially struggled to come up with a new way of seeing the world, I adjusted quickly. I started looking for opportunities to begin my career. Whenever I came across any person, I would imagine myself in their shoes at work. I did a virtual analysis to try and assess if I could do what that person was doing in their job. I did this for every job I observed in my little village: truck driver, postman, vegetable seller, shopkeeper, railway ticket reservation counter, school teacher, etc. As a visually impaired person, I’d identify which tasks in each job would pose problems and think up alternate ways I could do them.

With this little analysis, I decided to pursue a career as a school teacher. I figured I could record the textbooks, prepare for the class in advance and fluently talk in the class room. I took English as my subject expertise. My greatest concern was about correcting the student’s exam papers. The other challenge I anticipated was around managing the classroom—in case the students became distracted, fell asleep or weren’t listening at all.

I started to search for a school teacher job around my village. During my interviews, most of the people I spoke with were impressed with my subject knowledge but were not confident about how I could handle the class. Everyone denied me the opportunity.

Finally, I got a job at a charitable organization training a few students in speaking English and using Tally software. The salary was minimal, but I did not bother about it. For me, to be proven was far more important than the returns I got.

After working for few months as a teacher, I got the opportunity to learn how to use a computer with screen reading technology. I now had a new skill set to compete in the working world, but very soon I realized that even the digital space has barriers for persons with disabilities. So I readily accepted when I got an offer to join a software company as a trainee accessibility test engineer.

As I began my career as an accessibility tester at Iridium Interactive, I realized that the digital barriers for persons with disabilities were far greater than I had even imagined. As technologies increased, accessibility challenges increased as well. With the introduction of interactive web, dynamic updates of websites, mobile web and mobile apps, the demand for accessibility is only increasing. Working in accessibility testing allows me to both pursue a great career path and make an impact.

Over the past 10+ years, I’ve worked hard to learn about and contribute to digital equality. I have helped build accessibility practices at Cognizant Technology Solutions and was the Principal Accessibility Consultant at Deque Systems.

More than anything else, I love sharing knowledge about digital accessibility. I have trained hundreds of developers, designers and quality engineers over my career. I am now an Accessibility Training Manager at Adobe.

In the 21st century, digital inclusion is helping persons with disabilities gain independence. But simply having digital skills is not sufficient for making use of digital content; it’s is also crucial for the applications, software and websites we use to be accessible. Purchasing groceries, booking a doctor appointment, hailing a cab, paying utility bills, managing finance — everything is digital. If these applications and software are not accessible, people with disabilities cannot make use of them.

But how do you ensure that the digital content and software that businesses publish are accessible? Where can they get more information on digital accessibility?

I help to bridge this gap through Maxability — a website I launched 8 years back. I love to spend time spreading awareness on digital accessibility, assistive technologies and disabilities. Maxability provides information for developers, designers and quality engineers on digital accessibility. Recently I have also opened subscription based, self-paced training modules for accessibility enthusiastic software professionals. I am committed to updating and expanding the services on Maxability to continue meeting industry needs.

Read Next: Progress — Not Perfection — When Working with a Disability

Rakesh Paladugula is a digital accessibility specialist and disability activist. He has more than a decade experience in digital accessibility. Visit his website www.maxability.co.in to know more about him and digital accessibility. You can connect with him on Linkedin, follow him on twitter @rakesh_a11y and like Maxability on Facebook.

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A Vision for Digital Equality was originally published in Tech Disability Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What role do you play in your company? How has your Cerebral Palsy informed the type of work that you do?

I work as an Accessibility Consultant for Equal Entry. Most of my time is spent testing software with my hands, ears, and eyes. I’m laser-focused on identifying which tasks can’t be easily completed on our client’s websites without a mouse and a GUI (graphical user interface). I make sure every element on a web page or mobile application can be operated by a keyboard and screen reader and that all essential text is announced by the screen reader. It’s important that everyone can access the same information and features.

Occasionally, I write articles and blog posts about digital and physical accessibility. This is my favorite part of the job.

When I got my first smartphone, I experienced a newfound sense of freedom and confidence as I moved about the world. The connectedness that so many people loathe these days (myself included at times) is actually what makes me so passionate about technology. Being able to access people, information, and a digital map that updates in real-time has been a boon for my independence. I became obsessed with it, writing multiple papers about technology throughout college. After college, I decided that I wanted to share this passion with other people who may be in a similar position. I began volunteering at a day program for young adults with developmental disabilities and developed my own computer literacy course to teach the participants there.

To take my tech skills to the next level, I participated in a vocational rehabilitation program in Brooklyn which sponsored my participation in a web development boot camp. The career outcomes manager understood where I wanted to take my career and introduced me to the person who would eventually become my boss.

Describe your day-to-day experience managing Cerebral Palsy at work.

The nature of my cerebral palsy leaves me with extremely limited fine and gross motor skills in my right arm and hand, which means that I am a one-handed typist. This presents me with a unique challenge while conducting web accessibility testing.

Since attending the boot camp, I’ve used an app called Mirror-QWERTY that allows me to flip the keys on the right side of the keyboard to the left side when I hold down the space bar, vastly improving my typing speed. Unfortunately, the space bar is commonly used as a mechanism to interact with content on a web page, so, in a tragic twist of irony, I can’t use the application while testing. For this reason, I am slower at entering data in the spreadsheets I use to track accessibility issues. It takes me more time to do the same amount of work as my coworkers.

Have you ever requested accommodations from your workplace? What was that experience like?

It never occurred to me to request accommodations at work until it was suggested to me. Since my cerebral palsy is relatively mild, I’ve struggled with asking for help. It makes me feel like I’m inconveniencing other people and I worry that others will think I’m overreacting or exaggerating. But all of my coworkers have been extremely supportive.

The accommodation I was given is extra time to complete client assignments — I now have 6 hours to complete each task rather than 4. While this has been helpful, I am finding it is still not enough. As I become increasingly independent, I’m not always sure what my limitations and needs are. Discovering what kinds of adjustments need to be made to improve my productivity and efficiency is a process.

When I was a kid, I felt discouraged from exploring these types of things on my own terms. I think my parents thought that talking about it would hurt me because I didn’t look disabled and there is stigma attached to disability. Although I know they always did their best, not talking about disability as a young person has made it more difficult for me to talk about it now. I’m working to develop a deeper practical understanding of my disability. I also continue to work through my own doubts, fears, and insecurities so I can assert myself with confidence.

Read Next: How the Son of a Polio Survivor Became an Accommodations Manager in Tech

Sam Berman is an Accessibility Consultant based in Brooklyn, NY whose mission is to make technology easier to use for everyone. Outside of technology and Disability Advocacy, his interests include writing and music.

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Progress —Not Perfection — When Working with a Disability was originally published in Tech Disability Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.