Accessibility Is for Everyone

As corporate real estate professionals, building and managing productive work environments is our core remit. Ensuring that all our workplaces support the productivity needs of a globally diverse employee population is our most exciting challenge. As part of our workplace planning, we include the needs of our global workforce that are vision-, hearing-, or mobility-impaired, to give them a great employee experience that enables them to do their best work. Our Real Estate and Facility team views “disability” not as a personal limitation, but a spatial one where the work environment fails to match what a person wants to achieve given a particular physical circumstance.

For instance, not all of us will experience a permanent disability, but we all occasionally need some accommodation. When you have your hands full, carry a suitcase, push a delivery cart, or end up in a sling or on crutches, you will find that every doorknob, curb, stairway, and unreachable bathroom fixture becomes an obstacle. These are times when a truly accessible workplace benefit everyone.

Many countries, including the US, UK, and Australia, have strong accessibility codes, while others have less-defined codes or none. To ensure a consistent workplace experience across our portfolio, we are steadily upgrading all our sites to meet our own high standards, which often go beyond minimums required by our host countries. Our goal is to provide the greatest accessibility for as many people as possible.

To help us track and evaluate our success in this area, we recently launched a global “building accessibility scorecard” and have begun updating all existing sites to a baseline standard that exceeds regulatory requirements. This standard includes accessible front door entries, grab bars in bathrooms, door handles instead of knobs, and many other assistive solutions. 

 All full renovations and new builds such as at Puget Sound, India, Romania, and Costa Rica are receiving more advanced accessibility features. These typically include wheel-in counters, accessible showers, and washrooms equipped with automatic soap dispensers, faucets, and toilets, as well as faucets installed to the side of a basin instead of the back. At a leased building in Israel, we negotiated for an oversized revolving entrance door to easily accommodate those with wheelchairs, carts, or suitcases.

Meeting rooms are accessible and equipped with taller whiteboards that give both those who sit and those who stand a place to write. Height-adjustable touch-screens in common areas, signage with both Braille and high-contrast lettering, foot-height mechanisms to call elevators, and a selection of low, tall, and mid-height tables are other common requirements to help users of all stature and mobility levels function with equal ease.

Universal accessibility, when done well, quietly fosters a culture of inclusivity by putting everyone on equal footing in the workplace. For example, we often push for designs that elegantly integrate stairs and ramps, such as those at Buildings 40 and 41 in Redmond. We sometimes remove steps altogether in favor of a long gentle slope, which is highly practical for outdoor spaces and wide interior thoroughfares. Such solutions democratize the space and eliminate a subtle form of segregation for less mobile users.

Our reception desks receive equally careful thought. Rather than just lower a section at the end of the check-in area where it is expected that the wheelchair user will face a host sideways, we designed an open space below the counter so people can wheel straight in and be greeted and sign in easily while facing forwards. Surface tablets enable our hearing-impaired visitors to easily communicate when they check in. Simple changes like these allow every person to have a front-and-center lobby experience.

Safe, integrated, easy-to-follow travel paths for sight- and mobility-impaired employees are achieved with well-planned railings, furnishings, and changes in flooring texture. Visitors and employees in Bengaluru, India, for example, will now find tactile floor surfaces and continuously graspable handrails. Concrete “roads” through many dining venues in Redmond guide disabled people through congested queues. Many countries have food service operations with specific payment terminals for wheelchair users and for blind and low-vision people.

For those with low vision, we also consider how color and pattern choices affect their ability to get around. Barriers such as glass walls can be difficult to detect, for example, so in the Netherlands we used foiled glass in different colors to increase their visibility. Similarly, our constant attention to acoustics management can make it easier for hearing-impaired people to follow a conversation amid surrounding noise and activity.

Microsoft places a high value on creating workplaces that support people across the entire spectrum of being human. We continue to refine our accessibility principles in a living document called the Accessible Workplace Handbook, available free to all companies interested in creating workplaces that work for everyone. I invite you to read The Microsoft Accessible Workplace Handbook: Design for All, Available to All.