Disability inclusive hiring

Our January 2023 Cultural Calendar Club event was by LinkedIn sensation and Collective Member Jamie Shields. He provided so many amazing tips that we made it into a separate resource just for you!

Watch the recording of the event above - and read our distilled list of top tips below.

One thing that our customers always forget to do is to shout about all the things you are doing to include disabled and neurodivergent talent - don’t just do it - actively reach out to these groups to invite them to apply for jobs and tell them all the things you have done (and are planning to do next) to make work accessible and inclusive for them!

Ask your disabled talent to contribute to this work

First and foremost, Jamie recommends inviting voices with lived experience of disability and/ or chronic illness to guide your hiring conversation. Reach out to your disabled, neurodivergent and chronically ill employees to volunteer to help guide and contribute to this work. Emphasise that this isn’t you relying on their labour to educate everyone about the basics, rather they will be a vitally important, equal voice at the table in terms of shaping your inclusive hiring strategy.

Top tip

Always respect an individual’s right to identify their disability how they feel most comfortable. Jamie always says/ types the following instead of choosing just one: * People with disability * Disabled person *

Prepare for adjustments in advance to minimise implementation time

Everyone knows about reasonable adjustments, but what needs focus now is the time to make adjustments happen. Most adjustments aren't 'nice to haves'; work can feel impossible without adjustments (e.g. long lead times to get a large monitor in order to use a computer) this can take weeks when it doesn’t actually need to.

Think about travel

Think about transport and travel - for some disabled people travel can be an enormous barrier.

• Can employees work entirely remotely?

• Can they travel at off peak (less busy) times?

• Can you provide travel assistance (e.g. taxis)

If it’s an event you’re asking employees to travel to, have you checked accessibility in advance and communicated this to disabled employees?

By the time they log on in the morning disabled employees have already faced tens of barriers than non disabled employees simply haven’t had to navigate.

Walk the talk

Everything you communicate needs to be accessible:

• Marketing

• Your website

• Your Social Media

• Your Culture

• Your products and their packaging

• Your services

Unless disabled people have been involved in the creation of all of this, you are at risk of them not being accessible. Hire disabled talent to work on all of the above and you could realise some amazing business benefits!

A little bit of learning goes a long way

It doesn’t take long to educate yourself on different the different models of disability so you can share a common frame of reference with employees and potential hires:

• Medical model: Their body/ impairment is the problem for them

• Social model: The fact that the world was not designed to be accessible to them is the problem

• Charity/ pity model: We must help/ give to disabled people because they need our help

Language is important:

• Person first: Person with Autism/ person with disability
  Identity first: Autistic person/ disabled person

The individual will tell you which they prefer. Ask, respect their right to identify how they want to - and mirror their use of language and terms.

customers customers customers

Place accessibility at the very centre of your EDI strategy. If nothing else, consider that the spending power of disabled people is $13 trillion! Why would we neglect this group in our marketing?

Jamie’s top tips for accessible customer outreach are:

Add alt text and image descriptions to all images. Alt text is used by screen readers (which is assistive technology that helps people with a range of disabilities and neurodivergences to navigate websites). Alt text and image descriptions help people to build a mental picture of images. NB Screen readers are an emerging technology and require improvement; not everyone with a disability can use them.

Include closed captions on all video content. Test the captions to make sure they are accurate and representative of the audio.

Beware of design over function when it comes to captions. Forget making them pretty - or flash around the screen, keep them white on black and at the bottom of the screen. If the captions aren’t accessible they may as well not be there.

Think about colour contrast in all messaging to make sure text is readable by all. Try web aim colour contrast checker whose guidelines are based on the world wide content accessibility guidelines.

Make sure all hashtags are in #CamelCase (capitalise the first letter of each word to make sure they can be read by all).

Camel Case

Makesureallhashtagsareincamelcase

versus

MakeSureAllHashtagsAreInCamelCase

(do you see the difference?)

SusanAlbumParty is much better than #susanalbumparty

Accessible hashtags are not just for registered blind people and those with dyslexia, they are much more easily read by everyone.

Hiring collateral

If you’re looking to attract more disabled people, think very hard about your hiring process from start to finish. If your organisation’s website, job specs and hiring process isn’t accessible or representative, all other efforts to hire people with disabilities will be wasted.

Did you know that 98% of the world’s top 1 million websites are not accessible? When web developers, marketeers, user experience teams, designers and advertising teams are not taught accessibility as standard, we are quite literally excluding, via our systems, the 1.8 billion disabled people in the world (not to mention their collective spending power).

Top tips to help candidates know you are thinking about accessibility from the start:

• Colour contrast: Think about colour contrast in all messaging to make sure text is readable by all. Try web aim colour contrast checker whose guidelines are based on the world wide content accessibility guidelines.

• Try tabbing through your website. For those who don’t/ can’t use a mouse, this is how they will access your content. Accessible websites are those you can tab through from top to bottom, including all text and images.

• Make sure job applications mention diverse talent specifically, ideally mention those with disabilities explicitly.

• Mention accessibility and what accommodations you have already made.

• Make sure JDs are downloadable in a screen reader compatible format (Word is great - PDFs/ images are not).

• Offer a large print version of all JDs and applications.

• Think about your emails to applicants - and don’t use fancy fonts. Stick to sans serif. NB Dyslexic friendly fonts are not accessible to all.

• Think about images and logos in your email signatures - make sure they all have alt text.

• Consider adding an accessibility statement to the end of your email along the lines of “if you have any accessibility requirements or require any assistance, please let me know.”

Hiring processes

• Be open to being told your systems and processes are not accessible.

• Train staff on ableism and inclusive language, unconscious bias and how to respectfully and inclusively communicate with disabled people.

• We’ve been conditioned to disability being visible - the universal global symbol for disability is a wheelchair - yet only 8% of disabled people use a wheelchair. Always be open to being told something is not accessible and never assume that people without visible disabilities don’t have access needs.

• A candidate may have a neurodivergence and the interview process may be made vastly more accessible to them if they were able to see interview questions in advance.

• A candidate may be hard of hearing so they may need the interviewers to sit in good lighting and keep their mouths visible so they can lip read.

• A candidate may have ADHD and want you to know that whilst they may appear fidgety or looking around whilst talking - this may be far from the case and actually a sign that they are focussing hard.

• Some people might be more comfortable not being on video or face to face. Offer to use phone calls, video call or even instant messages via WhatsApp, Teams or Zoom.

• In her TED talk Yael Adams recommends always having 3 different ways we can communicate with somebody. E.g. Images can be an image, alt text and an image description.

Recommended watch: Yael Adams TED Talk: