"Accessibility is at the Intersection of Everything" on GAAD and Beyond

As the first Chief Accessibility Officer at Disability:IN I have thought a lot about this year’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day, or GAAD. It’s the annual opportunity to focus on digital accessibility for the global disability community.

?Accessibility is at the intersection of everything. I know this to be true; my work now is to get companies to follow this philosophy.?

Digital accessibility lets employees and customers with disabilities consume technology and content either in the mainstream or through the use of assistive technologies such as voiceover on smartphones, captioning on teleconferences, and fonts for dyslexia.?

Digital accessibility removes barriers and promotes inclusion, independence, and privacy for people with visual, auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, and speech disabilities.

Digital accessibility helps with recruiting, hiring, retention, and promotion of an under-employed talent pool of people with disabilities.

Digital accessibility improves the customer experience, as consumers with disabilities spend nearly $500 billion every year in the U.S. alone.

Digital accessibility helps protect your investment in marketing, as Google’s algorithms penalize websites that underperform on accessibility.?

Digital accessibility helps mitigate lawsuits and navigate regulatory requirements.??

Digital accessibility expands diversity of thought, drives innovation, and strengthens brand and reputation. I could go on.

GAAD is also a time to reflect on my personal journey with vision loss due to a degenerative eye disease called Retinitis Pigmentosa, (RP). For many years my vision loss was an invisible or a non-apparent, disability that I tried hiding at work. I viewed my disability as a vulnerability and spent many mental calories trying to fit in and be like everyone else.

While working at Fidelity Investments, as a Mutual Fund Representative at the time, I met Alicia, a Vice President at the company who lost her vision over 20 years ago due to Diabetic Retinopathy. Alicia helped me to embrace my vision loss as a strength and not as a weakness. I began to embrace my inner voice and decided to become intentional about my story, in the hopes it would empower other people with disabilities.

In 2018 I co-founded and was the Director of the Fidelity Investments Office of Customer Accessibility, eventually becoming Director of the Fidelity Investments Procurement Accessibility Program in April 2020. We created a business case, which was important to help Fidelity’s senior leadership see accessibility as a business imperative and differentiator.

With 1 in 5 people having a disability, websites and mobile apps had to be accessible to anyone wanting to transact on the Fidelity platform, including someone like myself who uses a screen-reader and magnifier.?

When Disability:IN asked me to join as their first Chief Accessibility Officer, I knew this was an opportunity to take what I did at Fidelity and scale it for Disability:IN’s partners. Today we’re working to build out a digital accessibility framework to help organizations become truly digitally inclusive across their enterprise.

Accessibility touches every aspect of an organization—from the way they interview and hire; to how they procure products and services; to the ways their employees interface with internal and external systems and tools; to how their customers are able to engage with them, and so much more.?

At Disability:IN, we’re helping companies to create the business case, prioritize technologies, develop governance programs and engage resources for scanning and testing to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 and other standards. We’re assisting in the creation of accessibility statements for their public websites like the ones on Microsoft, Apple and Amazon, as a recruiting tool.?

One thing corporate leaders should consider is self-disclosure. If an employee doesn’t self-disclose their disability at work, it can be more challenging for them to get approval to purchase technology and tools that differ from what others are using. According to the 2021 Disability Equality Index, only 5% of employees at the 319 participating companies self-disclosed. Leadership may be getting a false sense of the real numbers of employees with disabilities.?

That’s why we’re helping companies design centralized accommodations funds, which lets an employee who has disclosed a disability easily and discreetly request and buy assistive technologies, without looking like they're asking for special treatment, such as an ergonomic chair or large monitor. This also preserves a hiring manager’s budget, positively impacting the hiring experience.

When I was at Fidelity, Alicia and I founded the first Employee Resource Group for employees with disabilities. Employees with disabilities felt less vulnerable and began sharing their disability experiences. As more and more employees felt comfortable sharing their personal journeys, an incredible culture of acceptance, understanding, and confidence emerged.?

ERGs are wonderful because the power of knowing you’re not alone is life-changing. Now I want to make sure everyone is included from a technology perspective. Getting companies to embrace accessibility as a corporate value, not as an afterthought, is how we will get there. Today I am proud to say I am legally blind and that my vision loss is one of my greatest strengths.

Learn more about #GAAD and the ways you can advance inclusion and accessibility year-round at DisabilityIN.org.

Jeff Wissel is Chief Accessibility Officer at Disability:IN, the global organization at the intersection of disability and business. He spent 28 years at Fidelity Investments, where he co-founded and directed the Fidelity Investments Office of Customer Accessibility. Jeff is legally blind and has been an avid user of assistive technologies including screen readers and magnifiers for over two decades. He has the IAAP CPACC Certification, the ADA Title II, III Coordinator Certification, and is completing the DHS Trusted Tester Certification. Jeff lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with his wonderful wife and amazing daughters.