Sheri Byrne Haber Edited Jan 21 DEI After 5.mp4 - powered by Happy Scribe

Sacha Thompson is a respected and certified DEI coach. For the next 30 minutes, we'll get an exclusive look at some of her conversations with others in the field. Welcome to DEI After 5.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to DEI After 5. I am absolutely thrilled for you to join us today. My guest, I actually met probably about a year and a half ago when I was doing some Ted Circles, and we were having conversations about diversity and inclusion. And I appreciated so much her insight and her putting accessibility and disability in the forefront of the conversation. And so I wanted her to be a part of this conversation today because I think it's a critical part of DEI that is often left out. And so right now, we are going to welcome my guest, Sheri Byrne-Haber. So, Sheri, welcome.

Hi, Sacha. Thanks for inviting me here today.

Thank you. So go ahead and introduce yourself. For those that may not know you.

Sure. So I am an approximately six foot tall white woman. I wear Bifocals and I have short Brown hair. I use a wheelchair, and I have an insulin pump. So I'm somebody with some fairly significant lived experience with disability. And I've been working in the disability inclusion and accessibility field for about 17 years now.

Thank you. And so when we first met. Right. It was through these Ted circles that I was doing.

Which I thought were the most amazing things ever. I loved them.

Thank you. Thank you so much. And so what I appreciate it. Like I said at the top was you really putting forth the importance of focusing on disability and accessibility as we're having these diversity conversations. And oftentimes there would be a perspective that many people just didn't even think about or consider. Right. Our audience are mostly practitioners. And you and I kind of both know it's a part of the conversation that is often left out. And talk to us a little bit about that. Why do you think that is?

So there's a group that's based in the EU, but it's really global called the Valuable 500. And it's a nonprofit. And the initiative is to increase discussions about disability inclusion at the board and corporate levels. And they did a survey and said that 94% of organizations did not include disability in their DEI initiatives. And that's honestly pretty shocking because disability is the largest minority in the world. If you put all disabilities together, 18% of people globally have a disability. It's almost one in five. So it's a very significant portion of the population to just be completely ignoring.

Yeah. As you were saying, that what it brought to the forefront of my mind is I'm not even sure people understand what falls under disability. Right. I think and this is just from things that I've experienced and seen. People think, okay, disability are people that are deaf or hard of hearing, blind, or have some visual impairment. And sometimes they think about those that are in wheelchairs or those that are in crutches or some other type of mobile disability, but that's just a portion of the population. So what are some other aspects of disability that people need to keep in mind as they're talking about building out their diversity, equity and inclusion program?

Sure. So first of all, 70% of disabilities are invisible. So, yes, you think about the things that you can see because those are the things that are most obvious to most people. But each disability has a spectrum. So for hearing loss, you can go all the way from somebody who's got maybe a little bit of noise induced hearing loss because they turned up their headphones a little bit too loud when they were teenagers all the way up to people who are profoundly deaf. And even people who are profoundly deaf fall into a couple of different categories, those that use hearing devices and those who consider their deafness part of their identity. So you've got all of these spectrum, first of all for each of the disabilities. And then you've got things like dyslexia and epilepsy and maybe attention deficit disorder, multiple sclerosis, people who are going through chemotherapy. It's just that these disabilities aren't obvious. So first of all, you've got that going with you. And then there are actually three different categories of disabilities. There's permanent disabilities, which are the ones that limb differences, hearing loss that can't be corrected. Then you've got temporary disabilities. When I was at VMware, our new CEO, when he started in July, had a rotator cuff tear. Okay. So he had one of those big swing things on with his arm out at 45 deg. So for a six week, eight week period of time, he behaved as if he had a limb difference. Right. Because he had an arm that he couldn't use. Okay. So that's temporary, permanent and temporary. And then you've got situational on top of that. You could have somebody who's holding a baby. You can have somebody who's holding a mobile device. They can't use that arm for the period of time that they're doing those things because of the situation that they put themselves in. So it's even shorter than temporary. When you add all three of those things up, that's a really large chunk of the population.

Well, and that last group I didn't even think about. Right. Like the first two, I've kind of done some work in. But situational that's every day and everybody at some point in the day kind of falls into that category, and we don't even think about it.

I go into these technical discussions of what's assistive technology, which is at a large level, things that people with disabilities use to help them work around their disabilities. But have you ever done pinch to Zoom on a phone? Congratulations. You've used assistive technology. Right. And so that's an example of a situational disability. You got to a website maybe you were outside and it was bright, maybe it was silver text and six point font. When you do that, that's the same thing that people with disabilities, people with vision loss, like me, do every single day. And when that pinch to Zoom doesn't work, if the things don't reflow, if the screen gets all messed up, then, you know, you take your business somewhere else because, you know, as a person with a disability, that you're going to struggle to interact with that site.

Yeah. And what you just said just triggered for me. And again, I was in tech for ten years. Why? I truly believe that DEI goes beyond HR. Right. I think in the context of employees. Yes. What you're talking about touches HR in a way. But the design piece, that's the part that HR doesn't. They're not technical. They're not the engineers. The engineers like those teams, those product teams need to know and understand the importance of. Okay. How do we make sure that all of our customers can access what we are doing? Right? What are we doing to ensure that they are able to do what they need to do in order to get from point A to point B, whatever their technology is? And so it really is an expanded conversation beyond just employees.

Very much. So. Let me drop another little truth bomb here from the disability inclusion perspective. So the HR overlap that you're talking about is usually accommodations. And when I'm in the workplace and something doesn't work for me because of my wheelchair use, because of my vision loss, whatever the reason is, I have to go to HR and ask for an accommodation. Here's the truth bomb. If you design things to be accessible from the outset, if you include disability inclusion in your procurement processes, nobody has to ask for accommodations because it's built to be inclusive from the outset.

Yeah. And it's much cheaper. It's cheaper to build it in the beginning.

Nobody likes going to HR. Hr people don't like going to HR. It's slow. If I come on a conference and the conference isn't captioned. Right. It's an immediate need. It's not something that you can necessarily just flip a switch and fix. So with StreamYard, I know that people can use Chrome captioning. We don't have to have the captions turned on here, but that's just an example. So doing it right from the outset, everything. There's three categories on the software side. Everything that you buy, everything that you build, which is like internal web forms and employee facing websites and things like that, everything that you use, everything that you take from open source, all three of those need to be assessed for accessibility.

Yeah. We probably have some folks that are going to be watching this, that are watching this, that their minds right now are just going a million miles an hour because you probably again, the truth bombs. Right. These are things that people don't necessarily think about when they're talking about diversity and inclusion. I remember years ago when I was working in higher education, I worked in a building that was three stories and the elevator never worked. So I was just like, well, what happens if we have students that are on crutches or wheelchairs? What are we supposed to do? And nobody had an answer to that when I was in school.

So the Americans with Disabilities Act passed 31 years ago, plus or minus. I was in high school before that when I had surgery. I had to stay home. Right. I couldn't go to school because my locker was on the second floor. The classes some of my classes were on the second floor, and they refused to move them. When I graduated, there was no ramp to the stage, so I didn't get included in the procession. And somebody just handed me my diploma afterwards. It's a microaggression. It's uttering. It's reminding people you're different, you're not the same as everybody else. And if we're being truly inclusive, that's something that absolutely has to be addressed.

Yeah. And that's actually where I was going to go. Like, what are some of the little things that people can do today to start this? And I think you used a great example with the ramps. I did inclusion marketing for a while, doing events, and we made it standard. And it was a heavy lift to actually get people to think this way. Like, we shouldn't have to ask our speakers if they need a ramp. It should just be a part of the stage set up. Right.

And the reason for that is because it doesn't matter whether or not you have speakers who need the ramp. The ramp sends a message of inclusion. The ramp sends a message of we expect people who will need this to be on the stage some day. And the lack of a ramp sends the opposite message. It's like we don't think we've never had a disabled person up here, a person with a mobility disability, and we don't expect one.

Yeah. The other thing that we made standard for our sessions because we couldn't do it across the board, but I made sure that we did was we had a sign language interpreter available and just on stage with every speaker. And it wasn't because again, to your point, we have a speaker that may need it. It didn't matter to us. We wanted everyone to be able to see and understand what was happening. Right. And so those are just little tweaks that we made in the bubble and the space that we had. But I think that that's just the start. What are some other things that companies can do right now to at least make it a little bit more accessible to employees, customers, whoever.

So the number one disability in terms of the number of people impacted is actually colorblindness. So in tech, six and a half percent of people are colorblind. General population is four and a quarter percent. But in tech, because it's predominantly male, we're looking at about an 80 20 split, plus or minus. In most cases. The prevalence of color blindness is much, much higher because colorblindness is a male linked trait. So just reviewing presentation decks, making sure that you're not mixing red and green together and you're not putting red text on dark backgrounds where people who are colorblind can't even tell that there's text there, that's the number one thing that you can do, and it's absolutely free. Some people will say, well, sign language interpreters, they're difficult to arrange. They cost money. There's all kinds of stuff that you can do on a shoestring budget that will still make your environment and your events much more inclusive.

I love it. I think the other thing that even, of course, we're in COVID now. No one's really doing this. But even when we had a reception, we made sure that our cocktail tables were at different heights so that everyone could find a table that worked for them. Right. And so even doing that, we had people that said, oh, my gosh, this is amazing. There are a few people that had what we would consider invisible disabilities where they needed to sit down. Like, they didn't want to stand for an hour or two with cocktails. So even having the ability for them to sit was something that they like, we've never been to a reception that did this for us. So it's even those small little things that some people may consider like, okay, that's just too that's extra. You need to have some of that extra.

Sometimes it's not extra. It really does make a difference. So I used to be the head of accessibility for McDonald's, and I helped with some of the physical accessibility features of the new headquarters downtown. And so one of the things that we did was in all the coat closets, because this is Chicago, people wear coats in the winter. There was the tall rack for people to hang their coats. But then there was also a wheelchair height rack, and then there was some shelving above that where people could put hats and purses and other things. Those are the kinds of things that make people with disabilities lives much easier. And it shows that somebody was actually thinking about it.

Yeah. And that you just reminded me, too. I've heard of situations where they will have a wheelchair accessible stall in a bathroom, but the door to the bathroom wasn't wheelchair accessible.

Yeah. Or I've been in situations where there's a wheelchair lift that got retrofitted into something, and they used it as a storage area. I go to use the wheelchair lift, and it's full of Christmas ornaments and file boxes. I've gone to use wheelchair accessible bathrooms, and it's been full of toilet paper and paper towels that they were just storing on the side. So it's not enough to meet the Ada requirements when the building is launched. Right. People have to get Occupancy certificates. Somebody comes in, they make sure that everything is Ada compliant. The building as it's lived in has to be accessible. And so that means somebody janitors usually need to be trained to do some continuous monitoring so that if people are leaving plants or chairs or things in areas that make it impossible for somebody in a wheelchair to use, that it all gets cleared away overnight so that it's accessible the next morning.

Let's talk about that training. Right. So many trainings now talk about kind of the big umbrella. It's more about awareness of belonging, etcetera. Etcetera. But if you're leaving disability out of that conversation, no one is really getting trained on these things. Like no one is really thinking about, okay, how can we rethink our work, right. To ensure that everyone is feeling valued, seen, hurt, and it's not just based on race, gender, sexual orientation. Right.

Let's talk for a second about unconscious bias training, because there isn't going to be anybody listening to this who doesn't know what that is. If you're a hiring manager and you're one of those I want eye contact and affirm handshake kind of people. And if I don't get that, I don't want to hire that employee. Guess what? You probably just excluded everybody with autism because people with autism don't like making eye contact, and they're not necessarily interested in shaking hands. Or in the days of covet, that's something that an immunocompromised person. It might make them uncomfortable or somebody with anxiety. So you need to rethink your approach to almost everything and look at it through the lens of would this adversely impact a person with a disability?

So saying that, would it be prudent for organizations to have someone on their team that focused on accessibility?

Well, I think you're hanging a lawsuit target on your company if you don't. There were 4500 lawsuits just in 2021 pertaining to accessibility. And the numbers have been going up like this kind of a hockey stick slope up for about the last five years. Most of the cases are being decided in the favor of the disabled plaintiff. So having somebody on the DEI team focusing on disability inclusion, first of all, I think is important preferably somebody with a disability, but it needs to be somebody who understands the impact of all the different disabilities, not just necessarily the disability that they have in particular. And then secondarily, having accessibility training in your It team and your procurement teams is pretty important because you want to procure accessible software so that you make yourself a destination for employees with disabilities to come to. It's kind of a catch 22. If you want to make your software accessible, you need employees with disabilities. If you want employees with disabilities, you have to be disability inclusive. And that includes building an environment where they can work successfully.

And that also leads to it can't just be training, right? Because to me, I hear training and I'm like, okay, that's a checkbox, right? Yes, we did that training. We're good to go. It needs to be something where people are accountable. It's a constant review of everything that's coming out of these departments. So it's not HR sitting there. And this is why I keep going back to this DEI conversation in this industry is so far beyond just people's processes and procedures. It is what does this look like in our engineering Department? Like, what are we building? How are we building it? Who is building it? And just making sure maybe it is a checklist, maybe it's a process that that Department comes up with that they say, okay, these are the ways we're going to test this, because there's so many we just constantly hear so many products that miss the Mark because there's no one at the table that is representing that part of the population.

And it's even a little bit more than that because you need to create accessible experiences, not just accessible products. So accessible products is definitely part of accessible experiences. But all the things that go with the product, the purchasing process, the training, the customer support, marketing events, documentation, all of those things have to be accessible, too for somebody with a disability to equally participate.

I love it. So there's two more questions in my head, and I'm trying to figure out which one I want to go to next. You've been in this space for you said close to 17 years. What is probably one of the most challenging aspects of doing this work?

I think the most challenging aspect is that people think of disabilities as medical conditions when really disabilities are barriers that have been created that block people with disabilities from fully participating. So there's two different sociological models here. There's the medical model of disability and then there's this society model of disability. And really to be disability inclusive, you need to be on the society model of disability. So from the get go, that kind of frames how people think about disability. My wheelchair use is not a disability. Okay. storyIf you have that three storey building with stairs, whoever decided to do that, that's the disability. That's the barrier that was created to prevent me from participating equally.

I love that because it's a mindset shift.

It really is.

I mean, it really is like I have two bonus boys that are on this spectrum. And I'm like, they're not the problem, it's your program or whatever. That is the problem that makes it difficult. And so that is a total mindset shift that I think people need to start. Okay, how are we creating barriers to access then?

The other thing I would say, because you asked for two is that accessibility is a program and not a project. Okay. The project is the checklist piece. And yes, you can use checklists. Okay. But there needs to be a continuous assessment and a continuous feedback loop where you're actually addressing the issues that you find. And then as you build new features in your accessible product, making sure that the new features and all of the things that go with it, the training, the support, the documentation, that all of those things continue to be accessible.

Yeah. And I think the piece, too, that folks, I want to say I want to say take for granted, but it's almost like, okay, if we do something that's accessible, it's almost a different product versus making your product accessible.

I think you'll be familiar with the phrase that the disability community uses for that which is separate but equal. And we all know that separate is never equal. And there's even been a government decision about a case with an airline where they had two different websites, one for people with disabilities and one for people without disabilities. And the US government said, we're not having that.

Yeah. When you think about just our day to day closed captioning, curve cuts, those are the big ones that come out as everybody uses them. We don't know much about it.

Not just people with disabilities. Siri, was created for people with disabilities. Okay.

Right.

How many people use Siri that don't have a disability? Probably 88% plus or minus. So curb cuts are the classic example. They were created for people with wheelchairs. They did not exist when I was a child and my five foot nothing mother couldn't drag me up and down curbs in my wheelchair. Who uses them? Well, yeah. People in wheelchairs use them. Amazon delivery people use them. People pushing strollers use them. Luggage use them. Remember going back to those temporary and situational disabilities. And so we used the phrase curb cut in the accessibility community to mean anything that was created for a person with disabilities that ended up helping other people even more. So captioning is a curb cut. It helps increase English language learners. It helps people who are more visual. It's something only like 30% of people who use captions have hearing loss. People use it at the gym because it's noisy and they want the written text to reinforce what they think they're hearing.

Yeah. Again, it's a mindset shift that I think is so important. And for me, it's been talking to people like you and others that have been part of my sphere that keep me feeling like, okay, there's always something more to learn. But I find that my job is to help others share that information because we can't hold on to it. That's how we all make this a more inclusive world is to make that everybody has this information and it's so critical. So, Sheri, the last question that I have for you and I talk about this with all of my guests is we do so much for other people. Right. And so what do we do to fill our cups. And so we wanted to talk to you about what do you do to fill your cup? Yes. What do you do to fill your cup? What do you do to kind of keep yourself energized as you do this work?

Yeah. So for about the last two and a half years, plus or minus, I have been a Paralympic Archer and I'm quite serious about it right now. I'm probably at the peak of what I practice. I'm practicing about 3 hours a day, every day of the week, day in, day out. I don't have a good mindset for meditation. That's just never worked for me. But I find that I can get my mindfulness my quiet time when I'm out doing archery. And I love it so much that I ended up getting my coaching license for archery last March and I now coach disabled children for archery. It's just one of those things where having a disability doesn't matter. I won the California state archery Championship for my age group and my type of archery and everybody I competed against was non disabled. It wasn't the Para category.

Love it. That just warmed my heart because everybody has to find a place that just brings them joy and it doesn't necessarily have to be meditation or anything like that. And so archery, if that's your Zen place.

Archery is my jam.

I love it. So, Sheri, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been an absolutely wonderful conversation and if people wanted to follow up with you or find you, where could they do that?

So the best place to find me is either on LinkedIn and you can see how my name is spelled. There's only two Byrne-Habers on the planet and one of them I gave birth to. And I also have a fairly widely read Medium blog so people can find me. There. Also I publish usually twice a week, plus or minus on all kinds of topics ranging from just general disability inclusion all the way up to very technical details about how to implement particular features in code.

Yes, I love it. I follow that Medium post and there's always something in there again that I'm learning or something that reinforces things that I've been saying and I share it with other people like me. It's not just me.

Well, I appreciate that. Thank you so much for letting me leverage your platform, Sacha.

Not a problem at all. Thank you so much and thank you all for watching today. Be sure to chat you continue subscribing to this so that you get this directly into your inbox when the next episode comes out and we will see you next time. Have a good one.