Employers should be seeking out employees with disabilities, not avoiding them. Why are problem solving skills desirable in business? The ability to troubleshoot or solve problems is really a collection of a number of other skills including: Decision Making: To solve…
How to identify a Toxic Accessibility Culture, and what you can do about it
A broken organizational culture makes everything disability-related harder, from implementing accessibility projects to getting critical support to move the disability / accessibility needle forward Urban dictionary defines “Dumpster Fire” as: 1. A complete disaster. 2. Something very difficult that nobody wants…
Want to add value to your startup? Be accessible
What is accessibility? I could answer this question by doing a deep-dive into the WCAG guidelines and talk about the four pillars and 50 rules of accessibility, or I could say “Steven Hawking and Stevie Wonder need to be able to use…
Captioning: It’s Time for a Revolt
What if every person who was deaf, Deaf, had hearing loss (plus those peoples’ friends and family) refused to do business with a company that didn’t caption its videos? I saw an article recently, which identified strategies that business people who don’t…
This Week in Accessibility: Hertz v. Accenture
How a non-accessibility case could influence future accessibility litigation At its core (if you believe plaintiff Hertz) this lawsuit filed in New York federal court (SDNY) is about regular run-of-the-mill crappy software development, bad project management, broken promises, and a complete failure…
Running Accessible Meetings and Events
A primer to make the lives of participants with disabilities better. As someone in technology with a long-standing mobility problem, I have been to a LOT of meetings. Looking just from the perspective of access, most of them have been…
Digital Accessibility Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
Creating a metrics oriented hierarchy for tracking accessibility progress If you don’t know what an OKR is or why it is important to have them, please read this article first. If you are only going to skim it or don’t have time,…
“Hello, Sir”
How one thoughtless word can destroy a potential vendor relationship or cost you a job or hundreds of thousands of dollars. I have been in tech a really, really, really long time. I’ve reached the tipping point where frequently I’ve…
Accessibility — Separate but Equal is Never OK
This week, the US DOT ruled that Scandinavian Airlines’ separate site for people with disabilities was against the DOT’s web accessibility requirements. SAS was fined 200K, of which 100K is deferred if they behave. Their defense was that the consulting company whose…