Empower Every Person: Accessibility and Inclusion
The Modern Workplace: Reflecting Diversity
Would you tell every fifth person who visits your premises or website that you don’t want their business?
Would you say to 19% of the working population that they can’t apply for a job with you?
The number of people with access needs is equivalent to the population of China. That’s over a billion of us.
When your technology reflects the diversity of everyone, there are no limits to what your business can achieve.
Here we share practical ways to build a more inclusive environment and how accessible technologies like Microsoft 365 enable everyone to communicate, create and collaborate.
"ACCESSIBILITY IS COOL"
70% of disabilities are invisible. In the UK and US, the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is twice that of non-disabled job-seekers.
TD Bank is a multi-national corporation with 25 million customers and 85,000 employees. Its focus is on hiring talent with disabilities; 6% of its employees have a disability. “If you don’t make your workplace accessible you’re missing out on a huge amount of talent,” says Julie Branscombe, Inclusion and Diversity Lead.
Bert Floyd, the bank’s Team Lead of Assistive Technologies adds: “It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s good for business.“
Sometimes, a technology invented for people with disabilities becomes mainstream. A great example is audio books, which were intended to provide reading materials for injured World War I veterans. Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Chief Accessibility Officer at Microsoft, sums it up: “Accessibility is cool. If you design for every single person, you’ll create things that work brilliantly for someone with a disability but have massive implications for everyone else.”
One of the earliest examples of accessibility is the typewriter. In the early 1800s, Italian nobleman Pellegrino Turri invented the machine for his blind friend, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano.
Today, Microsoft - with over a billion customers with different perspectives, backgrounds and skills – leads the way in making the world a more accessible place.
IMPROVING ACCESSIBILITY - WHERE DO YOU BEGIN?
“To address a diverse customer base, you need diverse perspectives. It’s clear from the research that diverse teams are better teams.”
- Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President, Office 365 at Microsoft.
Teper and his team focus on making Microsoft 365 accessible by design. Accessibility needn’t be complicated or expensive. As Chris Schlechty, the accessibility champion in Teper’s team and Senior Software Engineer puts it:
“I think of accessibility as a set of tools that allow individuals to do their work or daily life tasks as no different from somebody with glasses.”