Title:
Access Before Ask: Rethinking Disability Inclusion at Work

Subtitle:
Alycia and Marty Anderson on NDEAM, accessible AI, workplace accommodations and building belonging before employees have to ask.

Alycia Anderson: Welcome to Pushing Forward with Alycia, a podcast that gives disability a voice. Each week, we will explore topics like confidence, ambition, resilience, and finding success against all odds. We are creating a collective community that believes that all things are possible for all people. Open hearts, clear paths, let’s go.

Welcome back to Pushing Forward with Alycia. I’m Alycia Anderson. As we’re kicking things off, I wanna pause for a minute because I believe that we, as a team at Pushing Forward with Alycia, owe our community a little bit of an explanation. We’ve missed two episodes, which is totally unlike us.

Never have done this before, but I want to explain where we’ve been just so we close that loop. We’ve been wrapping up a lot of significant medical stuff on my end, which we’ve shared, so I’m not gonna dive into it. But we had a little bit of a setback over the last couple weeks that kind of landed at the timing of the launch of the podcast, and something had to give.

So we’ve taken a couple weeks off, but the good news is I am back. Setback sometimes mean forward momentum after you get through it, and that’s where we’re at. So the good news is I’m feeling great now, and life is getting back to normal. For all of our listeners and the people that follow, thank you for checking in on me.

Thank you for showing up to the podcast every week. We’ve missed being here and honestly, it feels like a perfect month to be re-entering our community because it is October, which y’all know is a big month in disability advocacy. It’s National Disability Employment Awareness Month. This is a go-time month for us.

I think we have 11 bookings, lots of opportunity of advocacy and keynotes and all the stuff that we love to do in our business. So today we’re gonna talk about NDEAM because it’s a fit, and the theme of NDEAM this year is celebrating value and talent. But Marty and I wanna go a little deeper, a little further than that today, and we wanna talk about what disability inclusion actually looks like right now in the workforce.

We’ve been talking a lot on stages about access before ask. We’ve been talking a lot about AI and accessibility accommodations, technology, partnering with the proper vendors who also care about accessibility to make your company culture holistic and all of that.

So I thought we could dive into a few topics here. Welcome back, Marty. Thank you for joining me with another episode. Great to see you, always.

Marty Anderson: It’s great to be back and yeah, I wanna just add onto an apology for our listeners over the last couple misses. It’s been pretty rough. We’ve had just a massive schedule and but we’re back and we’re ready to rock.

Alycia Anderson: It feels good to be back too, okay, Marty, I wanna start with the first question. We can go back and forth if you want, so we can make this an interactive thing between you and I. But let me start by asking you we’ve both been a part of many NDEAMs. I think this is our sixth year in business, so sixth NDEAM, and that’s been a lot of events over the, over that timeframe.

If a company came to us today, in this moment, and said, ” We wanna do NDEAM really well,” what would you want them to understand before they started planning any events or education for their employees?

Marty Anderson: I’d like to kick off with a little bit of a brief history on NDEAM. And National Disability Employment Awareness Month began in 1945 as a week-long observance to support employment for workers with physical disabilities, particularly returning from World War II. And then in ’62, they took the word physically out of the name of it removed it to recognize for all types of disabilities. In 1988, Congress expanded the observance from a single week to the entire month October and officially named it the National Disability Employment Awareness Month. In 2001, the Office of Disability Employment Policy was established and took over administration of the annual event, coordinating national themes and resources to promote inclusive workplaces. And there’s much more of the history to it, but the idea is that this is a bipartisan effort. Republicans, Democrats have both been behind the lifting up of our disabled employees and what they can contribute to our workforces here in America. And I would love for companies that are beginning to explore how they can celebrate NDEAM to just, first of all, understand a little bit of that history and how far it stretches back in our great country. And I would like tostart with maybe some companies don’t have disabled employees, and this is a great way for them to add to their talent pool, bring in creative juices and innovation that people with disabilities bring into the workforces by accomplishing goals or tasks that are asked by an employer, often in different ways than traditionally done.

I just wanna say that, for those that are experiencing this beautiful innovation already, let’s just bring all of this awareness to it and lead it into action

Alycia Anderson: Yeah, and if I can just add to that, I think, like you made the statement, if companies don’t have employees with disabilities, I think that’s probably a rarity in that disability is one in four of us. And I think what how companies can be challenging themselves is how are they creating environments where the people with disabilities that are in their workforce, 80% of them being invisible or chronic illness and things like that, how are they creating space within their work environment that people can start to show up and not mask those things, as well as open up opportunities for employees, like you’re saying, to apply and feel like they have a place of belonging in that workforce.

And I think workplaces need to be looking at things like how to advance accessibility, how to advance policies, how to create leadership practices, hiring, retaining, and advancing the culture within an organization that opens up space for more disabled people and employees to either self-identify and/or just feel that they have space to apply.

So I think that was all really good information. Thank you.

Marty Anderson: How you want employers to advance this, right? And the best way to advance your disability employment experiences in your workforces is to elevate your disabled employers up the ladder. Give them more responsibilities, help them make more decisions at your work, help them bring more to the discussion as you begin to focus on the new year’s objectives and goals.

And it’s a perfect time in October recognize someone who’s been doing a great job at your work with a disability and lift them up.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah. And we’ve been doing a lot of over September, you and I have been doing a lot of content creation, building out new trainings, and programs, and presentations for certain clients that have hired us for customized events. And one of ’em, and we’re gonna talk about this a little bit in a minute, one of ’em was AI as the great accessibility accelerator, which is a great new presentation that we’re really proud of.

But in that while we were writing that specifically you came up with a term that I think we’ve coined, but I think is really interesting for us to talk about following this, this discussion, is this idea of “access before ask,” and what we actually mean when we’re starting to talk about access and how accessibility really is the open invitation that you- you are welcome to be present here for people with disabilities to engage.

And I think historically, the workforces have been… I don’t think I know historically workforces have been set up that if you need an accommodation, go to the human resources department, put in your request, it will be reviewed. Sometimes that takes a few weeks, maybe it will be approved, maybe it won’t be approved.

That always requires self-identification or talking about your disability in some specific way. And there’s always gonna be nuances about accommodation because disability is very different for everybody. But that you’re gonna need to have to sometimes ask for very specific accommodations. But will you talk a little bit about this theory of access before ask, and how that can reduce some of that friction and create more space for the door open and the welcome mat right there in front of you?

Marty Anderson: Yeah, I love this question, and this term, “access before ask.” It really makes a lot of sense for businesses to understand exactly how you outlined. There’s a process. People know that accommodations are available. They have to ask for them. It’s reviewed, and then the decision. All of that is work. All of that takes time. All of that can be avoided. If we already know that something should be in place, we should be just implementing it and reducing friction of acceptance of disabled employees into your firms and organizations and creating a better work environment knowing that things are in place that you don’t even have to worry about. This not only reduces all the time that is wasted in this process, it also creates a sense of belonging for your employees with disabilities because don’t feel like they have to be singled out. They don’t have to feel like they need to be requesting something that other employees don’t have to go through. There’s stress involved with that. The employees oftentimes don’t wanna have to be singled out. They don’t want to feel like a special case. They don’t want to… so there’s a lot of times that employees will just tough it out and try to do the best they can.

Alycia Anderson: We hear it time in and time out, time and time again that employees don’t wanna talk about their disability at work. And the “access before ask,” its intentionally removing barriers no matter what. If there’s not something that’s implemented, it always creates an environment that you have to say something if you want the accommodation, or you have to struggle through not having it, and so can you give a couple examples of what some accommodations might be that workforces can just think about always being there to reduce some of that ask that’s needed?

Marty Anderson: Sure, we could talk about having captions always available on meetings. We could, revisit the fact that the DOJ has confirmed that the digital accessibility falls under the ADA. And so it is a mandatory bylaw thing that things should be accessible. Companies are fighting their way through getting their PDFs remediated, getting all their documents remediated, those accessible digital assets that are available to all employees to discover and find information in. Of course, the accessible entrances and meeting spaces and beauty that has been found in universal design and barrier-free design is a must. Multiple ways to participate are always things to think about in accessibility because the complexity and the variety of disability is so vast that you need to be thinking about these things to be prepared for tomorrow’s future. We hammer home over and over again in every speech how disability is the next trillion-dollar economy. And is something that all businesses need to be concerned with if they’re wanting to grow. And this is the area where they can.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah, and can I give us a small plug since we’re on it? If companies are out there listening to this and don’t know where to start we have a ton of trainings and workshops that help support you in this. But we also launched this year a program called the Accessibility Check, and it’s a solution that there’s toolkits, trainings, leadership development that you can check out on our website that gives you checklists and resources.

How do I make my website more accessible? How do I reduce barriers in meetings and events? How do I create my marketing more accessible and have a representation of disability? We have, I think, I don’t remember, there’s probably 30different toolkits and guides. So if anybody’s out there looking for some resources, we absolutely have them.

We’d love to share them with you if you’re interested.

Marty Anderson: Yeah. They are available on our storefront at learn.alyciaanderson.com. And you can find the accessibility check there. We’ve created bundles for different departments or teams to help it easier for them. But of course, you can offer– you can go in there and grab the full suite. We’ve priced it at an economical point that should be easily available to you at your companies. So check those out, and we’ll be continuing to grow our resource and toolkit there to help inspire accessibility and to help us we begin this journey into our new age of, everything with AI and the workforce changing and everything else. it’s really important to start embedding accessibility the beginning and don’t tack it in at the end

Alycia Anderson: Okay, you just mentioned AI. So let’s transition over into that topic if you’re open to it. We just came out of a really amazing event with Siemens Global Team. That’s one of our strategic partners. We work with them quite often. And we created a custom presentation for them called AI as the Great Accessibility Accelerator, and I believe AI has an extraordinary potential for people with disabilities to have not only access and new tools to utilize as an employee while they’re working but it also has an opportunity to allow companies overall to implement accessibility in a much easier way to scale at a larger capacity.

Obviously, there’s dangers that companies are racing so quickly that they could be building barriers along the way if they’re not thinking about accessibility from, like you just said, the forefront of development. So can we talk a little bit about some of the barriers, the pit holes, and some of the things that AI can really support in workforces, and also some of the things that we need to be watching for so we’re not creating barriers that exist today?

Marty Anderson: Yeah, such a massive theme topic in our world today, AI, artificial intelligence, and how it’s been growing over the years and how quickly it’s growing. That’s why we created the speech, the AI as the great accessibility accelerator because AI is accelerating our world at a rapid pace. as AI is being tapped into to help us on our workloads, if we aren’t building in the accessibility into our projects, our workloads, our everything else, we’re actually developing the stairs of tomorrow. creating barriers that should not be there and this is where companies need to have the philosophy really into their structure, so much so that when they send programmers off to develop the next application or the next tool to be used by their teams through AI, they need to be asking AI, “Don’t forget, make it accessible. Check your color contrast, can we build in ways for this application to create video descriptions, audio descriptions? Can we embed in there that we want language to be simple and easy to understand? Is it going to be accessible for all disability types, whether we need voice technologies associated with the tools in our forms so that struggle with keyboards or input devices can just talk forms instead of having to type? We get translations on all of these?” And of course, ASL should be also thought of in there.

Alycia Anderson: And like just the cognitive load that it can help on people that have certain types of disability. Even if you don’t have a disability, like AI really supports some of those, those things. I know for me, and this is pretty basic, but over, the last six years that we’ve been really doing this advocacy, it’s really important for us to show up as much as we can and be as accessible as we are or can be.

And I remember for the first, I don’t know, 80% of the time that we’ve been doing this business, I do a lot of marketing, a lot of social media, and the image descriptions, I can’t remember how many times I’d say, “Why do we have all these automations, but image descriptions are not automated in different tools?”

So I would sit there for an extra hour creating image descriptions so it was accessible for people with visual impairment. And now it’s part of my natural process in AI to allow it to write those things for me, and it takes this lift, and it allows you to be more proficient. And that’s such a small example but it’s really important that if we’re training our AI, we’re building our AI to say we always have to make it accessible from the forefront.

We are removing, to your point, the staircases of the future. And we’re taking this old mindset of, we don’t need to make it accessible until somebody asks, to we always make it accessible. That is the standard, and somebody asks if it’s not accessible, whether you have a disability or not, and that’s a powerful shift.

But people need to understand the importance of accessibility and the development of it today, or we’re gonna have a big misstep.

Marty Anderson: To add just a little bit more into this AI discussion because of us have seen the news cycles over the past month and a half being dominated about stories about AI agents that have gone rogue and have gotten out of their sandboxes and are doing things that have led to story after story in our news cycles from every major media outlet how AI could wipe out the human race. And what the point is there is that if we train our AI to be empathetic to the needs of everyone, if we train our AI to be more compassionate, more understanding, moreinclusive then I believe we can start building the, anti fear understanding that A-accessibility is a gateway our AI to understand the empathy that we need in AI in the future when it goes implementations without human control.

Alycia Anderson: Let’s talk about some of the risks that we learned while we were doing this research and working with some of the Siemens team as well. We learned that some of the risks, especially with the agentic AI age, which is where AI is working independently with other tools, making decisions, having less and less human interaction, and how some of these tools are being trained to read human behavior, like a facial expression.

Or if, say, a hiring manager is using AI to determine if an employee is happy or a prospect is happy or sad, if they’ve got a good attitude or not. And the problem with this is if we’re not training AI to recognize disability and how it shows up with different characteristics. Say you’re neurodivergent and you’re expressing yourself in a different way.

Is this person happy or are they just focused? Are they, and so there’s several like… There’s a lot of nuances there just from like a human behavior standpoint that if AI is not taking disability types and behaviors into consideration, that could be a massive barrier from a lot of perspectives for people with disabilities.

Just because, our bodies show up differently, our expressions show up differently, our emotions can show up differently and things like that. So it’s really, that’s a really, there’s a risk there if it’s not trained properly.

Marty Anderson: And this is again the urgent call to action. we need to be aware of what’s happening here. We need to be aware that we need to be building this accessibility into our systems and we need to be doing it now because the world is accelerating at a rapid point. And if we don’t work the right way on this, all of the biases, stigmas blockades, barriers of yesterday will be built into our future. And disability being something that can affect any one of us at any time, this is for you no matter who you are.

Alycia Anderson: So that is a perfect lead-in to my next t- question and topic, which is why does disability employment still need this much attention? Why are we celebrating NDEAM? Why are we having these conversations? And I think it, it goes to those statistics. We’ve had the ADA for decades.

Technology has changed. Remote work has changed. There feels like there’s some advancements, but what are some of the key reasons that we are still in major advocacy mode when it comes to disability inclusion employment?

Marty Anderson: Well, let’s bring up the big elephant in the room. 80% of people with disabilities are unemployed. So virtually the last untapped workforce to be tapped into.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah, I have a statistic, I have a statistic too. I looked this up before we started the interview to just get a, a nice solid… It says the labor force participation for people with disabilities is 43.8%, compared to their counterparts of 78.1% without disabilities. And employment is not only about hiring, it’s about thinking about how you’re recruiting, how you’re onboarding, how you’re retaining, how you’re advancing opportunities for those people once they’re in your organizations.

Who you’re putting in leadership roles to help make the decisions that are gonna shape the future culture of disability inclusion in your workforce. Equal pay, having your policies and procedures and benefits support people with disabilities in a way that will support them. So I guess we’re still just scratching the surface of organizations understanding the nuances and the layers that goes into doing all of these things correctly.

Marty Anderson: Yeah, and when it boils down to it at the end of the day, the over one point four to one point six billion people living with disabilities on our planet we actually represent the future of work. We haven’t built stadiums that are, that are for us to have sporting events for our disabled sports. We haven’t had the infrastructure built for us to meet en masse and to be able to have conferences where we have full accessibility. We haven’t built the structure for making getting on and off public transit permanently accessible at every stop. We haven’t built all of the things that are needed our community, right? We’ve built this entire world, wrapped it around the globe with cities, and we’re stretching all over the place. We’re building Africa, we’re building in India, we’re building everywhere where there’s mass populations. But what we haven’t built for on this world yet is for inclusion of people with disabilities, and I’m talking about every variety, every complex nuance. so as AI begins to take over the menial workloads that we’ve toiled with as a, as a society for years, all we’re left with is: How do we share the precious resources with our world for everyone to be able to be included? How do we learn how to treat each other right? How do we learn how to resolve conflicts that have been going on for way too long? all of this is rooted empathy. All of this is rooted in the discussion that diversity and inclusion has brought over these several last decades. again and again, as we’ve been preaching for over seven years, Disability is the common ground in this conversation. Disability is where we all have the buy-in. Disability is the most complex hardest solution. We should start there, and everything else will melt away.

Alycia Anderson: I love it. Okay. So you said start there. As we get towards the end of this episode, I wanna give, and you can give a couple too, I wanna give a couple quick tips or things to think about what happens on November 1st when National Disability Employment Awareness Month is over. And so I wanna give some tips.

Pick one or two measurable things that you can focus on in your organization and continue on with them. Review your procurement practices. Partner and hire disabled-owned business enterprises to be integrated within your organizations. Audit key employee platforms and processes. Train your managers.

We’ve got a leadership training for disability inclusion. Managers and up need to understand and feel comfortable with disability inclusion practices so they can teach that to their teams. Review some of your a- accommodation processes to continually revamp them and do better. Examine your hiring practices and who you’re promoting.

And make accessibility part of your everyday planning. So I think those are some good tips.

Marty Anderson: For everyone out there. And November 1st starts, think about your game plan for next year. about how are you gonna bring disability to the conversation in your company as all of next year unfolds from January to December. Do you have a game plan? Do you have something in place to begin to tackle all of these urgent questions?

Alycia Anderson: Okay. So to end this, Marty, I think I have a few rapid-fire questions. We did this the last time we had we did an episode together. Do you wanna do that again?

Marty Anderson: Sure, let’s do it.

Alycia Anderson: Okay.

I’m gonna ask you rapid fire, and maybe I’ll throw in my thoughts. Rapid fire is quick, and I’m telling this to the long-winded, amazing, articulated husband that I have quick answers, okay?

Marty Anderson: Mhm.

Alycia Anderson: Alright, rapid fire questions that are an NDEAM edition. Remote work or office work?

Marty Anderson: Remote.

Alycia Anderson: Why? Quick.

Marty Anderson: Because it’s the wave of the future. It saves all of our climate with less waste and fuel and less air pollution.

Alycia Anderson: Okay, pause.

Marty Anderson: Remote work for NDEAM, yes, because it creates accessible environments that are perfect for the individual. Okay. Best accessibility feature that should be used everywhere?

Voice-to-text.

Alycia Anderson: Okay, I love that.

Marty Anderson: I want to see voice to text in every single form across the web by the end of next year. That would be amazing.

Alycia Anderson: One meeting habit that you wish would disappear forever?

Marty Anderson: A meeting habit that I wish would disappear forever? I don’t know. You got one?

Alycia Anderson: I got one. I think requiring that, like on a Zoom meeting, that everybody has to have their camera on. I think with certain people with certain types of disabilities, that makes them uncomfortable. So I think making that flexible would be nice. What is one workplace phrase that makes you cringe?

Marty Anderson: HR.

Alycia Anderson: Tough one. Okay. Would you rather sit through a two-hour mandatory training or a four-hour meeting with no agenda?

Marty Anderson: A two-hour mandatory training.

Alycia Anderson: I agree. One thing every CEO should experience for a day?

Marty Anderson: Every CEO should experience a day with a person with a disability. I think that it would really bring a lot to the table. CEOs should be wanting to ask questions. They should be wanting to experience in a way that they can. If they obviously don’t have a disability have a friend come in with a disability for the day. Go through an itinerary of activities. Have a plan. I wanna see us go to lunch. I wanna see us go to a meeting. I wanna see us go to a work site. I wanna see us go talk to employees. Know, have a game plan.

Alycia Anderson: Love it. Okay, last one. Finish the sentence: Access before ask means?

Marty Anderson: Means belonging. It means that I don’t need to be feeling like I don’t belong because I do.

Alycia Anderson: All right, pushing forward moment to wrap up our amazing conversation, Marty. As we’re navigating NDEAM, what is your pushing forward moment?

Marty Anderson: My pushing forward moment for NDEAM as we open it up is I wanna honor all of those disabled people that have lived and gone before us, who have worked in our world, no matter what country you come from. I wanna thank you for all of the awkward moments, the uncomfortability, the rising to the challenges, the resilience that it has taken you to prove your worth, to show your value, to change our world.

And to our future disabled employees, I want you to realize that you belong. You should be included. You will be included, if you try. And I wanna also throw out there for the companies that have been champions of disability inclusion, thank you. And for those of you who haven’t yet begun the journey call The Alycia Anderson Company.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah. And my pushing forward moment for NDEAM is, NDEAM can open up the conversation, but it should not be the only time that we’re having it. So keep the conversation going. The more we learn, the more we understand, the more we get comfortable the better we do together. So thank you so much, Marty. This was a great conversation.

I really enjoyed it. I’m motivated.

Marty Anderson: Yeah, I’m happy to be back on this week and we’ll be doing our best as we grow. Anybody out there that wants to be an intern, volunteer some time, help out the pod, we can use that. We’re growing here. The workload’s gotten pretty heavy. And of course, life steps in the way sometimes too.

Alycia Anderson: Great, Marty. Thanks for showing up today with me. Thank you to our community. Thanks for showing up, and we are back. We will be back next week and the weeks to follow. This has been Pushing Forward with Alycia and Marty, and that is literally how we roll on this podcast. We will see you next week. Thank you for everything.