In the past, the accessibility was more physical accessibility that covered people with disabilities’ movements in a business environment. Of course, this simplifies the topic and the challenges that people with disabilities go through every day.
The topic of accessibility is becoming more and more vital. There is a worldwide effort to make digital space accessible for people with disabilities in the workplace and also in everyday life. In this blog, I will only talk about a few thoughts on accessibility and human resources for the visually impaired.
Visually impaired workers face several challenges today. In human resources, we can make things easier with the help of accessibility tools. The challenges involve hiring, onboarding, training, and tools to function at work. If your team uses Jira/Confluence, Unstoppable eases your accessibility requirements.
One example is that in one of the all-hands meetings we have, I realized that one of our visually impaired co-workers had difficulty muting and unmuting the platform. A very simple task can become a huge challenge. Entering simple information for timekeeping, training, and onboarding have its challenges.
Key Takeaways
Here are my key takeaways to make sure that we can make things easier for people with disabilities
Accessible onboarding process: Get digital signatures in documents if possible. Chances are you do not have a braille printer, which would make it difficult for the person joining to read your document
Accessible engagement: A lot of team-building activities or stress management activities do not take into account people with disabilities. For example, if you create an in-house art competition, include people with disability by providing an alternate activity at the same time, maybe lyric writing.
Accessible tools: Your workforce will need accessible tools. Check with your IT team if the tools are accessible or not. Most organizations have a 508 report published alongside the product. (Note: This task is usually done by the in-house accessibility team in larger organizations, but if you are a smaller org, you may need to take control of this
Feedback: Accessibility should be a continuous process, rather than a one-and-done case. The best advice is to take regular feedback from your workforce.
Addteq Offerings
Unstoppable for Jira and Confluence try to solve these challenges for companies that use Atlassian platforms. It helps make Jira and Confluence 508 compliant so that can help companies effectively to use it. This is one of the tools that aim to provide equal access to resources for people who might otherwise be limited.
The unstoppable plugin is also for me and my team and with visually impaired employees. It allows visually impaired users full accessibility Jira service desk for HR issue-tracking purposes.
Also read: Inclusive workspace – Working in digital accessibility teams
