Working My Way Through Vision Loss

In honor of National Disability Employment Awareness Month, I’d like to share why you don’t need to be an accessibility expert to help create a welcoming workplace.

Before I get to that, though, I’ll start by saying that I am someone with a disability. In fact, I’m someone with a disability that becomes more of a disability with each passing day. You see, I am in the advanced stages of a degenerative eye condition that causes blindness, and the smaller the view I have remaining, the faster it seems to go.

As you might guess, for a busy professional undergoing stark changes in his ability to use familiar tools and perform well while on the job, the experience of progressive vision loss could certainly leave one feeling vulnerable or at risk. In my view, however, this reveals advantages that come with being part of a workplace community that’s not just inclusive and accessible, but that is next-level in terms of how welcoming it is.

Now admittedly, the notion of a place being ‘welcoming’ may seem pretty abstract and difficult to quantify, but you can tell when you experience it. 

We experience a welcoming workplace when even senior leaders take the time to learn accessible best practices. When a colleague goes out of their way to help a peer overcome an inaccessible interface. Or when you join a random Zoom call, hosted by a team other than Digital Accessibility Services, and find them using inclusive practices like self-identification when speaking, or speaking out descriptions of visuals being shared on the screen.

Perhaps the biggest indicator of a welcoming workplace is a shared understanding that disability affects all of us. It’s real, raw, and undeniably human. It is often unpredictable, not always neatly defined, and neither is it always visible. Creating a welcoming workplace takes patience, and an authentic desire to understand the experiences of others. It requires us to get comfortable in discomfort, and resist the urge to intervene if it’s taking a moment or two for someone to do a thing. And when in doubt, always feel comfortable to just ask if or how you might offer help!

Let us all commit to a heightened sense of awareness & support for disability in our workplace, during October’s NDEAM celebration, and throughout the year.

Happy NDEAM!

Do you have other examples of the welcoming workplace at Harvard? Share via our DAS Feedback Form or email at digitalaccessibility@harvard.edu.