What do you do if your workplace communication excludes individuals with disabilities?

The first step to recognising barriers in the workplace is to canvas your employees and customers. If there are barriers within your workplace, customers will face similar ones. From the data gathered, you can identify what actions need to be taken to overcome the identified barriers. Implementing an access and inclusion plan is the best approach. This plan will not only identify the barriers and recommend actions to address them but also provide a process for continual improvement to ensure future barriers are identified and addressed in a timely manner.

The only way to recognise barriers is to talk to disabled people. Gain new perspectives. Find out what the gaps in your understanding of barriers and disabled people’s needs are so you can work to dismantle those barriers. Find training companies founded by disabled people who have solid understanding of the spectrum of disabilities and who work hard to amplify the voices of other disabled people.

I disagree, you have to engage disabled people as the first step so you CAN identify barriers. Without them involved from the get go, you can’t possibly understand all of the barriers that are in the workplace in the first place. Only then can you engage others to become allies and empower them to help rectify the ableism that is causing the barriers to exist. We need to help people to understand that ableism is a problem for us all. As being non-disabled is often temporary. If you live long enough, chances are you will eventually become disabled, whether through accident, illness, pregnancy, or age related degeneration.

I agree. Offering a range of communication methods as a universal practice is a great first step in becoming proactively inclusive. Allowing speech to text and text to speech software to be used across the whole company as well as other provisions like grammarly, braille, captions, and access to online interpreting all adds to an inclusive environment and a feeling of psychological safety.

100% training is a key step. But ensuring the training is built by disabled people themselves, who have a strong understanding of ableism and anti-ableist practices. DisMantle Initiative is a great example of this.

Trauma-informed training is critical. Marginalized groups, such as the neurodiverse and individuals with disability, are even more likely to have experienced trauma through bias and injustice, harassment, community violence, food and housing insecurity, bullying, and more. Building awareness around this topic. educating staff on the core principles of trauma-informed care, cultivating psychologically safe environments, and holding everyone accountable to these principles ensures a more equitable and inclusive environment.

It’s not just inclusive communication that needs to be considered for inclusive policies and procedures. The procedures employees have to follow also need to be inclusive. You can have inclusive communication but if the procedures are too convoluted, don’t make sense, or duplicate work by having the same data needing to be inputted in multiple different platforms, neurodivergent people may struggle to manage the workload. Policies need to take an intersectional approach by recognising people can have multiple disabilities as well as other protected characteristics that impact on their ability to flourish in the workplace.