What is Your Company Doing about Disability Training

Disability Awareness Training

Mark Lasser is among the most inspiring speakers, educators and motivators. His personal story of his recent blindness is a story in candor, perseverance and hope. He is now putting all he learned into a very amazing training program.

He covers how to be comfortable working with and interacting with people that have disabilities. Many people have not worked with a person who is in a wheelchair, who is blind, deaf or both. They have questions and are not sure what acceptable behavior is. This can result in unnecessary awkwardness or unintentional insults. We will discuss etiquette in addressing different disabilities as well as how to behave around a service animal. We will cover the language used by and for different disabilities and explore the differences of empathy and sympathy. In extended sessions, we will also cover some aspects of legal compliance including the ADA and other regulations pertinent to your industry and company.

Accessibility 101

This training incorporates some of the disability awareness training described above. Additionally, it emphasizes technical barriers that people with disabilities face and the ways they can be mitigated with assistive technologies and how obstacles can be reduced and eliminated through remediation. We will cover issues related to people who use wheelchairs, people who are blind, deaf, and deaf/blind as well as cognitive disabilities Topics covered include screen readers, Braille displays, ASL, telephone relay chat, WCAG standards and Section 504 and 508 of the American with Disabilities Act. We will also cover specifics to your industry and company.

Accessibility 201

This session builds upon the Accessibility 101 session. We delve into more detail and look at specifics for screen readers. We also cover issues related to UI and UX design and explore ARIA tagging, common traps and mistakes in front end development code and look at both successful examples of accessible tools as well as some failures. This session will include two presenters of which one will be experienced in writing HTML code, Java script and will have experience in Agile and lean UX analysis.

We will take a surface level look at your company website and internal tools if desired and explore things that are both working well and that are in need of remediation. This will give your team a birds-eye view of how accessibility subject matter experts see your accessibility environment and will establish a beginning level of communication that can start a path to becoming an accessible company.

About Mark B. Lasser

Mark Lasser was most recently the Senior Director of Accessibility for Charter Communications. As Senior Director of Accessibility, he worked on both external and internal accessibility efforts to bring television, Internet, other communications, and entertainment services to people with disabilities. A graduate of the Sanford Institute of Public Policy at duke University, Mark spend the 90’s producing and production managing film and television projects before working as a consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers, Akamai and iFilm. He then managed national accounts with SmartBrief for CTAM CTIA, NAB and CEA. Four years ago, Mark lost his eyesight to a rare optic nerve condition. He is an avid advocate for people with disabilities, a frequent user of audio description and adaptive technologies He earned both his MBA and an MS in Accounting from the University of Colorado. When not working at his day job, Mark loves travelling to off the beaten track places and has visited Tibet, Borneo and can navigate the canals of Amsterdam without a map. He is very much a dog person.

Mark B. Lasser Disability and Accessibility Training, [email protected] | Phone 720-933-9665