Empowerment through the eyes of my five-year-old self

I didn’t notice I was doing anything differently from anyone else. But my mom did. She saw me limping while running after a ball. Shortly after that, at age five, I was diagnosed with Legg-Calve-Perthes, a rare hip disorder in which the ball-shaped head of the thighbone loses its blood supply and collapses.

Living with this condition was an immersive experience: special casts that kept my legs in an awkward position, long hospital stays in a big city 500 miles away from my family – it was a lot to take in. When I was released from the hospital, I was given a wheelchair that didn’t fit my casted legs. Crutches didn’t work with how I wanted to move. We eventually traded in all forms of physical support for a pair of gloves to protect my palms as I “walked” on all fours. That’s how I got around until age seven when the casts finally came off, and I learned how to walk upright again.

Legg-Perthes didn’t impact just me. It touched everyone in my life – from my brothers who took me to school in a wagon or sled, to my gymnastics coach who let me work out in my A-frame casts in whatever way I could, to teachers reconfiguring desk space, door frames, and seating assignments. Everyone figured out ways to allow me to do what I wanted and needed to do.

This formative experience taught me this: we all want an environment – tools, facilities, education, support – that allows us to take part and succeed. No one is asking for special treatment – just the opportunity to participate as our whole selves. In some environments, this requires an investment in raising awareness and deepening empathy.

Each one of us has or will likely have a permanent, temporary, or situational condition that presents a mismatch for the conventional ways of interacting with people or our environment. It’s our collective responsibility to lower barriers to participation through empathy and inclusion so that everyone can engage in an experience with a sense of dignity, belonging, and empowerment.

Today is the United Nations International Day for Persons with Disabilities, dedicated to helping leaders, planners, organizations and governments think about systemic ways to empower people through accessibility and inclusion. On this day I find myself reflecting on my own experience as a child and the impact companies can have in these areas.

At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our ambition is to create products that meet the 7.5 billion people of this planet where they are. That means recognizing how technology can unintentionally exclude people from participating when designed solely from a single perspective of ability, and rethinking how to design for a full spectrum of disabilities from physical to cognitive, from sensory to mental health.

It is this mission that led me to Microsoft. It energizes me to see how this mission drives our employees, collaborations, and our product designs. For example:

• Roberto D’Angelo and his wife Francesca, motivated by their son Mario, developed Mirrorable—a gaming platform that uses the concept of mirror neurons to personalize rehabilitation for kids who suffered perinatal strokes.
• We seek out partners to help schools, workplaces, and entire cities be more broadly accessible.
• Today we announced new captioning and subtitling features for PowerPoint and Skype to provide a more engaging experience, especially for people who are deaf or hard of hearing.
• This spring, we released the Xbox Adaptive Controller, built for gamers with limited mobility. This is the controller in our recent holiday ad featuring Owen who moves us all to give wonder and keep playing.
• Learn more from our chief accessibility officer Jenny Lay-Flurrie in her blog and her commitment to empower every person including the one billion people with disabilities who engage with our products and services at work and at home.

An added value of Microsoft’s human-centered approach is that designing for permanent disabilities often ends up benefitting people universally. Each one of us has or will likely have a permanent, temporary, or situational condition that presents a mismatch for the conventional ways of interacting with people or our environment. It’s our collective responsibility to lower barriers to participation through empathy and inclusion so that everyone can engage in an experience with a sense of dignity, belonging, and empowerment.

My temporary childhood disability keeps me committed to and continuously learning about accessibility and inclusive design. I invite you to think of a time when you had to alter something in your environment or when you had to alter your way of doing things to adapt to a permanent or temporary change in your condition. What design changes would you appreciate? Please share your experience with me in the comments. Let’s open the dialogue and keep learning together.