- You're a Senior Design Leader,
and you want to create a more inclusive experience,
for all of your company's users.
You are considering building an accessibility program,
but you don't have any previous experience to draw from,
how should you get started?
- Well, if you need to get started quickly,
let's say you're in the US or you're outside of the US,
but you've been threatened with a lawsuit in the US,
because you have American customers.
My answer is usually, start with contract resources,
while you're building a team, right?
Because accessibility people
are in pretty high demand right now.
Accessibility, traditionally is not taught in college.
So you're going to find people
who've taught themselves accessibility along the way.
And there's only like 8,000 of us globally,
that are certified, for example,
between the two major certification programs.
So you always need to have at least
a couple of those people involved,
with the top level of certification,
because they're the ones who really know what the future is.
They're not going to make a decision for the short term
and then 18 months later, you're like,
oh, whoops, we didn't think about that.
So there's that.
But even, let's say you've got a decent sized budget
and mandate from the C-suite, which is always important,
you're still not going to be able to do the best job
unless other people are talking about accessibility,
other than the accessibility team.
So VMware's got, I think 33,000 employees right now.
And I tell people,
we've got 16 people on our accessibility team
and they're like, "Wow, that's a lot."
But 33,000 employees, that's like one accessibility person
for every 2000 employees.
So you need people to talk about accessibility,
when the accessibility team is not in the room, okay?
How do you do that?
You increase the number of employees
with disabilities, you have.
How do you do that?
Some of it involves doing training
on unconscious bias, related to disability.
How to interview somebody who's neuro-diverse, for example,
is a really important thing to understand,
especially in tech.
Do auditing your internal tools,
it's not just about what you sell.
So when I started at VMware,
85% of our tools were inaccessible.
And that was just because of a lack of decision-making
and a lack of understanding of the needs
of employees with disabilities over time.
And I subscribe to the Richard Branson school of business,
which is, if you take care of your employees,
your employees will take care of your customers.
So there's a lot of things
that the senior leader will have to work
in a cross-functional manner, to be successful.
Not because the senior design leader cares about HR,
or cares about DEI, or cares about procurement,
but because if things don't get paid attention to that,
that's going to really hamstring his ability
to produce that inclusive product that he really...
I said, he, she, they, really want, at the end of the day.
My design leader is male, so I was mentally thinking
of George, when I said that.
- And are there natural allies, that you've found
in your experience, working in these Fortune 200 companies,
that may not be people with disabilities,
but people that just inherently get the value
and the purpose, of making an experience accessible
for all people.
- There are, some companies are more open about how
they go about their accessibility day-to-day operations,
than other companies.
VMware happens to be fairly open about it,
they haven't really put too many restrictions
on what I can say publicly.
Other companies are very hush-hush about it,
they treat it as if it was a trade secret.
I think that the best thing to do,
is to look at the companies who've been doing it well
and been doing it for a long time,
like Google, Microsoft, Apple,
those are the three that I usually start with.