What I learned working with persons with disabilities

Three months ago, I invited a colleague using a wheelchair for a meeting in downtown Toronto. It was the coldest day of the winter, and everybody was walking through PATH, the underground system in Toronto that connects buildings, trains and subway. At one point she called me saying that she was having challenges to find an elevator to my building. From PATH, you can easily find stairs, but elevator can be trick. After some time, opening several doors, she found an elevator to the building. This “accessible” elevator happens to be the same facilities use to take garbage from all floors from the building, and the smelling was terrible. When she reached the right floor one more surprise: no automatic door to the office. What a shame, especially because I invited her to talk about accessibility. She looked at me and said, “welcome to my world”. This awful experience did not affect her mood, and she managed to make the best out of our meeting, despite my embarrassment.

I admire the resilience of persons with disabilities. They face exclusion all the time. The constant challenge to connect to an inaccessible world turns out to resilience skills, which helps them to maintain stable phycological and social attitude when adjusting to the environment. Every time I meet my colleague, she shares a big and beautiful smile, and I know she has already faced many exclusion situations throughout her day. Like many persons with disabilities, she learned how to manage adversity, and like a muscle, with practice and exercise, she developed mental toughness.  

Resilience, as a soft skill, is not the only strengthen persons with disabilities can offer. They can show us mismatches and remind us to see and experience the world from a different perspective. Organizations that embrace persons with disabilities as part of the workforce understand that skills can be transferred, and everyone benefit from a diversity set of viewpoints. To mention some examples, working with people with sight loss I learned how to present without visuals. This skill helped me to be a better communicator, translating images, data and texts to words and narratives. I am now leveraging these skills in meetings and presentations. Working with people hard of hearing, I learned the importance of presenting with live captions and including subtitles to all videos. The side positive effect, a person who is deaf can follow my content, as well foreign language speakers or even people following my presentations in a noise environment.

This week I joined an Accessibility session as a speaker at one of the largest bank institutions in Canada. In the room, many people with disabilities, both visible and invisible. I put in practice my skills, all of them acquired because I work with persons with disabilities, and I realized that some videos in my presentation did not have audio description. Instead of not showing the video, I decided to describe or read the content while the video was playing. At the end of my session, one of the attendees raised his hand and shared a feedback. As a visually impaired, he thanked me for the attitude of describing the video – he mentioned that he had a chance to play the same content in other occasions, but he finally understood the content because of the way I presented. I need to say to you, I was really happy with his comment – like many people, I am also afraid of make mistakes, say a word that might offend a person with disabilities… but this feedback was encouraging.

As I’m working advocating for inclusion for persons with disabilities, I’m also seeing exclusion everywhere, and I am learning with them how to develop resilience and figure out ways to change the status quo. It is a work that will take generations, but I believe we will get there one day. I would like to share three simple tips that you can also apply to your daily life that will end up helping us all:

1)     Attitude towards inclusion: Be mindful that someone in the room may not be able to see, to hear, to comprehend or be able to arrive at the place you are organizing the meeting. Prepare in advance, share options for people to join online, make your content accessible and don’t read slides. Use AI technology and present your content with close captions. To learn more, click here. 

2)     Hire persons with disabilities: We don’t know what we don’t know – if you are really committed to create a diverse workplace, start by hiring persons with disabilities. They will bring unique perspectives, and they will force the system to change. Ensure you have the right environment in place. To learn how to make your workplace more inclusive for persons with disabilities, click here.

3)    Compassion: once you identify a problem, like the one I mentioned with the elevator and the door, fix it. Share the insight with your organization and bring awareness around accessibility. By understanding and engaging, you will move your organization to inclusion.

We all benefit when solutions, products and services work for everyone. This is an imperative business opportunity, and an amazing source of inspiration. I really hope this article can help you and your team to make your workplace more inclusive. Please feel free to share your stories and opinion and contribute to this conversation.

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 Microsoft Accessibility Lead for Canada, responsible for helping organizations to create modern, inclusive and accessible 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, Angola and Mozambique. His philosophy is to live deeply and intensively, sharing compassion, inspiration and love along the way.