Have good disability etiquette – Three tips to make your workplace more inclusive

People who have never interacted with a person who has a disability may think of the exchange as intimidating. They might worry what to talk about, how to approach or how to avoid staring. These concerns are understandable, specially because the representation of people with disabilities in the workplace is yet minimum, but it’s important to realize people with disabilities should be treated the same as everyone else. With the advance of technology, we are finally going to welcome more and more people with disabilities in the workplace, and we all need to improve our disability etiquette.

There are one billion people around the world who live with a disability and any of us at any time can experience a temporary, situational or permanent disability. By the age of 65, 50% of the population will have a kind of disability. As the population is aging, we should expect to see more and more pressure for accommodation, and inclusion initiatives are imperative.

Three tips to make your workplace more inclusive:

We first need to understand concepts and terminologies used around disability and accessibility in the workplace and learn how to make our interactions more inclusive. For example, instead of identifying a person by their disability, like that “Blind person”, switch it around, the person who’s Blind. If you remember to put the person first, the rest will fall into place. Another example: when you are communicating with a person who is Deaf, and working with a sign language interpreter, don’t face and speak to the interpreter, speak directly to the person who is Deaf.

Tip 1: Watch and learn what accessibility can be like in the workplace – Microsoft official training for employees available for everyone.

At work, when sharing information, content and presenting, ask yourself “is it accessible to everyone?”. Building presentations that are fully accessible benefits people with disabilities, participants with different learning styles, and those who speak other languages. The best presentations are delivered with both imagery and verbal descriptions, giving participants sufficient context to understand the content.

Tip 2: Deliver more inclusive presentations – Increase your inclusive presentation skills by watching this video.

As I work for Microsoft and advocate for people with disabilities in the workplace, I receive requests for training and on-demand content related to accessibility features embedded in Windows 10 and Office 365. Microsoft 365 provides best-in-class apps and powerful cloud services with accessibility built-in. It is designed to meet the needs of people around the globe with different abilities, ensuring everyone can create, communicate, and collaborate on any device. The good news: we have a lot of FREE trainings available in our portal - check the link below:

Tip 3: Make your content accessible – create more accessible Email messages in Outlook, documents in Word, workbooks in Excel and slides in PowerPoint

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Ricardo Wagner is Brazilian, living and working in Canada. He is an Economist with an MBA in Business/Marketing. Ricardo has worked for Microsoft since 2006, and he is currently the Senior Product Marketing Manager responsible for helping organizations to build Modern Workplaces. Subject matter expert in Accessibility, he is co-leading the Disability initiative at Microsoft Canada. He is also an Ambassador for Microsoft Myskills4Afrka program, with volunteering assignments in Rwanda, Kenya and Angola. His philosophy is to live deeply and intensively, sharing compassion, inspiration and love along the way.