In this article:
Sheri Byrne-Haber discusses the importance of accessibility for a person in a wheelchair or with a disability. Sheri Byrne-Haber is a CPACC Certified Accessibility professional with degrees in CS, law, business. Sheri is also a wheelchair user w/ a deaf daughter.
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 OK, some have been really good, but some have been embarrassingly difficult and awkward to downright inaccessible.
Non-Starters
I’ll start with a couple of items that you should never, ever do.
No meetings / gatherings on grass UNLESS there is an accessible path that reaches all areas
This is a pet peeve of mine, because I have personally experienced it so many times. I have heard every excuse in the book on this one, usually it is some variation of “but we have such a large group, there is no where else we can do this?” In that case, my response is “it appears to be a gathering that you don’t expect people with disabilities to attend?” Oh, it’s a mandatory meeting you say? My response to that is “You must think your meeting is so important that you are forcing your attendees with disabilities to risk injury to attend.” But you don’t have any people with disabilities attending? (that is a different problem). People with disabilities don’t distinguish between temporary and permanent disabilities. If you work for one group you will work for the other. And no one can prevent a sprained ankle from occurring the day before an event.
99.9 % of the mobility aid using population can’t handle the gopher holes and dips that are in almost every grassy area. Hidden rocks can be a huge danger, as can fellow employees who start behaving like cattle and try to push past or through people with disabilities. If there are chairs, they are usually on uneven ground, uncomfortable, and unstable. And if you put a single seat off the grass, you might as well be screaming “we forgot to think about this.” Here are a couple of things you can do to make this work.
No walking meetings
I would like to find the genius that thought walking meetings at Kaiser were a good idea, and make he (or she) spend a week in a manual wheelchair. When your corporate motto is “Thrive” I thought that meant everyone should thrive. No one thrives when they are excluded from a work event. I really hope that issue is limited to my previous employer, but I suspect it is not.
Safety Considerations
First and foremost, are there any safety concerns? If you are in a skyscraper, make sure you notify security that someone who might need special evacuation is there, and what floor they are on. Make sure people who use mobility aids know what the emergency procedures are: exits, “place of refuge” etc.
Is there enough space?
People with disabilities just need more space. Ranging from trying to do a U-turn in a wheelchair (60 inch clear space minimum to accomplish this) to walking with an assistant and a service animal three-wide there is just no way around this requirement. Standing room only in an indoor setting is absolutely not accessible.
Is the attendee with a disability bringing an assistant/interpreter?
This is a very important logistical question for badges, seating, and lunch counts. The assistant is an individual, not the extension of the person they are assisting. If they are a sign language interpreter, speak to the person with the disability, not the interpreter.
Is your location service animal friendly?
You should be asking attendees if they are bringing service animals with them: 1) So you can make sure there is enough space, and 2) so you can let others know in case there are people with serious allergies or dog phobias. Usually people with service animals bring everything with them that their animals need, but having an extra collapsible dog water bowl never hurts. Also knowing the location where the service animals can go to relieve themselves is helpful.
Have you considered using AIRA, Be My Eyes, or Right Hear?
The first two services provided sighted human assistance to people who can’t see. The third service is beacon-based, runs on an accessible app, and is specifically focused on helping blind people find things without sighted assistance. All three could provide real time assistance to someone who is blind to find the bathroom for example, or a trash can.
Do you have accessible content and alternative formats?
Follow the WCAG guidelines when creating presentations and files that may be made available after the presentation. Microsoft Word and Adobe both come with accessibility checkers built in. Make sure you use them. At a minimum, make sure that:
all informational images have descriptions
colors have a strong contrast (i.e. no gray or pastels) and don’t use red and green together
nothing moves automatically for more than 5 seconds
videos have closed captioning and descriptive audio if necessary
there is a table of contents for any handout more than 10 pages
content can be magnified without distorting text
no flashing images or videos that could trigger an epileptic seizure
if you are using Adobe — tagging and language setting are essential
Are your videos and live talks accessible?
There is no valid excuse for playing an uncaptioned video at a work event. I don’t care where the video is hosted or what device it is being played on, just caption it. You can use a service like 3PlayMedia or (fun4thedisabled uses ASL Captions). If you don’t have budget to get a service to do it for you, you can caption it yourself. You can even easily caption videos you don’t own and control — just make a copy (download from the primary source and then upload the file elsewhere as a copy you can control), create the captions file, upload the captions to the copy, and play the copy with the captions turned on.
Signage
Is there signage for both elevator users and stair users? I just went to an event where the stairs were nowhere near the elevator, and the room location was optimal for stair users. I had no idea which way to go from the elevator, and that combined with my terrible sense of direction resulted in me getting very very lost. Just the simple step of making sure that all sighted people have access to signage is helpful. Having assistance for people who are blind or have vision loss is essential since it is unlikely that
Were people with disabilities involved in the event planning process?
If you know people with disabilities will be attending your event, definitely involve them. It can be considered insulting to make decisions about where people with disabilities want to sit, or what their needs are. There is a reason the disability community was responsible for coining the phrase “nothing about us, without us”
Conclusion
By at least thinking about these items before an event, as a meeting organizer you avoid running around like a crazy person trying to solve the problems at the event. Additionally, you are unconsciously telling all of the participants “we care about things that impact people with disabilities.” I don’t claim to speak for all disabilities, so if you have your favorite thing that you wished people would do at meetings you have attended in the past, please list it in the comments !
The most important thing from my personal perspective as someone who needs accessible events is: Don’t make it sound like whatever was done was a huge fuss or involved a lot of time and hassle. Accessibility considerations for people with disabilities is something that event organizers should be doing all the time, and not “special” for a particular individual.
The idea for this article came from Claudio Vera, head of accessibility for Royal Caribbean cruiselines, partly from when he saw me struggling to get lunch in my wheelchair at #CSUN2019.
Sheri’s blog can be found at https://medium.com/@sheribyrnehaber
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