There are plenty of articles on how to move from an individual contributor role to being a manager. Not so many the other way around. Nine months ago, I was presented with a choice. My job responsibilities had grown beyond…
What people with disabilities hope to see in a Biden Presidency
After four years of ridicule and inattention to PwDs being completely normalized, the future is looking slightly brighter. My first presidential countdown clock started January 20, 2017, the day President Trump took office. My expectations of disability rights stagnating during his…
#DCX: Disabled Customer Experience
Anyone with a disability has endless stories about being treated differently SOLELY on their PwD status. #DCX tracks those stories. Having had a life-long mobility disability, I think I’ve heard it all, and then it never ceases to fail that…
Received an accommodations request? Think twice before turning it down.
This is Part 2 of a two-part article. Read Part 1, The Manager’s Practical Guide to Handling an Employee Newly Diagnosed With a Disability here. What are accommodations? An “accommodations request” is as simple as an individual communicating the following type…
Your first attempt at making anything accessible will be awful
Don’t use this as an excuse. Even awful is better than 98 % of what other people are doing. My primary goal in life is to convince people to make things accessible, which is defined as making products and services…
How people with disabilities can be ableist
TL;DR: They internalize the dominant paradigm: abled is good, disabled is bad. Exhibit #1: Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott Greg Abbott is a wheelchair user, only the third wheelchair-using governor in United States history. What happened that caused him to…
Organizations with $33 Billion in annual revenue were sued over accessibility in one week last month
2020 accessibility lawsuits are on track to be close to 50 % higher than either 2018 or 2019. This article reviews a single week’s worth of those lawsuits. PACER is the go-to tool for lawyers wanting information about the status…
An open letter to the Medium powers-that-be on accessibility
The new design changes are pretty, but the experience for people with disabilities using assistive technology is still quite poor, especially for authors. Accessibility is the ability of people with disabilities to use software or consume information equally to people…
Can’t Find Underrepresented Minorities for Tech Jobs?
Suggestions to reframe that always-erroneous statement and steps organizations can take to combat workplace -isms. At the end of September, the CEO of Wells Fargo publicly stated the following: “he unfortunate reality,” he wrote, echoing comments he had made on a video…
The Accessibility Profession Can Be Stressful, Exhausting, and Frustrating.
Stress and adversity are standard for people who have chosen accessibility careers. When you add in being disabled, that is a double whammy. This is the first of a two-part article. I have seen zero articles on coping with being…
