Disability Connect Panel: Video and Transcript
In honor of National Disability Employment Awareness Month, Tech Disability Project and Adobe hosted Disability Connect on October 7, 2019. The evening included a 45-minute panel with Disability ERG Leaders as well as time for connecting.
Our panel included:
Govind Balakrishnan, VP Creative Cloud Product and Services and AccessAdobe Executive Sponsor (Adobe)
Srin Madipalli, Product Manager and Able@ Lead (Airbnb)
Iris McLeary, Software Engineer and Mixability Lead (Mixpanel)
Sunday Parker, Accessibility Outreach Program Manager and Global President of Abilityforce (Salesforce)
Natasha Walton, Founder of Tech Disability Project, Moderator
Watch the Video
Thanks to everyone who was able to attend Disability Connect, whether in person or via livestream! I’m looking forward to working with this community to continue growing our presence in the tech industry.
If you have any feedback on the event that you would like to share, please fill out this quick survey.
Full Transcript
Natasha Walton:
Hello everyone and welcome to Disability Connect. I’ll give you all just a minute to find your seats. My name is Natasha Walton and I am the founder of Tech Disability Project. About this time last year, we launched Tech Disability Project and this community came together online to share our stories about navigating our careers while managing a disability. This year the tech disability community is coming together to connect in person, as well as on a livestream, for the very first time. Please give yourself a round of applause for being part of this event and this community.
I’d also like to thank everyone who emailed in questions for our panelists. We’ve incorporated these topics into this evening’s discussion. So without further ado, let’s kick off our panel.
Hello everyone, thanks for being here. I’d love to start off — if you all could just introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about your company’s disability ERGs. Srin, do you want to kick us off?
Srin Madipalli:
Yep, sure. So, hello everyone. My name is Srin. I’m a product manager at Airbnb and I lead what is known as the in-home accessibility team. We are a team whose job it is to make travel easier for people with accessibility needs. I started there nearly two years ago after the company that I started, which was a travel company for people with disabilities, was acquired by Airbnb and I moved over from London to San Francisco to build out this new team and group. Very recently I became one of the co-chairs of Able@, which is Airbnb’s ERG group. We are currently in the process of organizing a lot of our global network into chapters. Today a lot of our work as been very San Francisco focused, but we are actively now trying to expand this in more programming in other offices, as Airbnb has expanded and scaled across the globe.
In terms of current initiatives, a lot are to do with accommodation policies, recruitment and raising awareness to other people within the company that we are a resource. Basically, the way me and my co-chairs describe what we’re doing, is to try and institutionalize our work at the moment. We’re moving from an ERG at a start up, where everything was quite informal, to now having everything more institutionalized as part of a global company.
Sunday Parker:
Hi. Can you hear me okay? All right, awesome. I don’t get my own mic because I’m not as important as Srin. (Laughs.) Hi, everyone. My name is Sunday Parker. I am from Salesforce and my day job is Accessibility Program Manager for our accessibility team under our user experience department within Product. I also am the global lead of our employee resource group, or as we call them at Salesforce, Equality Groups, called Abilityforce. So, we started as a grassroots initiative with a couple of employees back in 2016 and we’ve grown pretty tremendously over the last couple of years. Now we’re the fifth largest employee resource group at Salesforce with nearly four thousand members, which is pretty exciting. We tend to focus on a few different workstreams within accessibility at Salesforce, covering our events, real estate, and our product. So, we work really closely with those teams to work on closing some of the accessibility gaps as we find them and liaising with those teams to provide some consulting on accessibility.
Iris McLeary:
Hi, I’m Iris McLeary. I’m from Mixpanel and I am a software engineer and I just recently actually stepped down as co-lead of our Mixability group to take on a new role on our brand new diversity council to lead company level, business aligned initiatives around diversity. My Mixability co-lead is around here somewhere. So, when I joined Mixpanel almost a year and a half ago, the ERG program had just gotten started. There were five groups and when I was signing up, I signed up for Mixability and they told me no one else had signed up yet. Boom, I’m the lead, and over the past year and a half we have gone from that, to being the most visible presence, at least in the San Francisco office, having our sign up all over the place on resources we’ve provided, and focusing very much on the idea of universal accessibility, that we all bring something different to work and we all need different accommodations to do our best and everyone deserves access to that.
Govind Balakrishnan:
Hello everyone. My name is Govind Balakrishnan. I am from Adobe and I head up product and engineering for the Creative Cloud business. I’ve been here for a very long time. I was actually just talking to a couple of people here. I’ve been in this neighborhood for roughly 18 years. I worked at Macromedia which was acquired by Adobe and I’ve sort of been in this neighborhood, been around all these buildings here for the past 18 years. I’ve truly enjoyed my time here but for the past year and a half or so, I’ve also taken on the role of an Executive Sponsor for the Adobe Access network, which was actually set up by Natasha a few years back when she was part of Adobe. I’m not sure if we have done justice to it but we are definitely trying our best. Sucheta, who is back there, she has been spear heading a lot of the work that we do around accessibility both here in San Francisco and in our San Jose office. We have branches of this network in every one of our locations.
We have very diverse expectations from this network. We try hard to make the workplace more accessible but we also try to give back to the community to the extent possible and look for ways to make our products more accessible. I can speak to it more as we get into the panel discussion but I’m super excited to be here, super excited to have all of you here, and thank you for organizing this and inviting me to speak here.
Natasha Walton:
Thanks to each of you. It’s great to have you here. Though July is Disability Pride Month, within the work place each October we honor National Disability Employment Awareness Month. The disability employment rate in the US is still only 29% compared with the 75% employment rate for non-disabled people. With that in mind, why is it important for tech companies to prioritize disability hiring and inclusion? Govind, would you like to kick us off?
Govind Balakrishnan:
Yeah. I think at some level a lot of it starts with the number of users that we have for our products. If you think about the statistics around people with disabilities, roughly 15% of the global population has some sort of disability, and as a product leader in a company, as you’re looking to broaden your gaze, it is important to find ways to make sure that you have products and you build products that address the needs of your broader user base. And if you can do that by also insuring that you have the right kind of people, who are experiencing some of the pain with our products, helping to build the products, helping formulate what the product should look like, what it should feel like, then you get to a great place because you have win-win situation there. Because at some level you have found ways to engage with the community, bring them into the fold, help them formulate and build the products, that can then be used by the community. I think that’s a win-win situation for everyone, and it’s something that I really value and hold true,
toadvocate for ways to bring more of that culture within Adobe.
We’re trying to find ways to engage with the community through various means. It can feel… When you walked in you probably saw the Project Hired table that was set up outside. We engaged actively with them a couple of months back, where we invited them for a job fair within Adobe San Jose office where we engaged with the community, tried to understand how we could help them gain employment, either at Adobe or other places, and found ways to train them with some of our tools and make them more employable across other parts of the tech industry. So, all in all it has been a very very symbiotic experience, where we have found a way to work with the community, to help the community and have the community help us build better products.
Iris McLeary:
Yeah, building off of that, there is a huge pool of relatively untapped talent and if you can be the company that brings these people in and actually makes them feel welcome, provides the accommodations they need to be able to do their best work, that is a talent pool you just tapped that no one else has and it’s a talent pool that brings very diverse experiences to the table and so it can be… We have a sales engineer who’s partially color blind and unfortunately has had to be the watchdog for red/green color blindness accessibility in our product because he’ll just go around filing product tickets every time he can’t use it. And that’s kind of an annoying position to be in as the only employee whose doing that, but I am so glad we have him, because I’ll see a new design come up and I’m like “Come here a second. Can you just comment on this? Can you see this? That’s what I thought, okay.”
Sunday Parker:
So, I think the tech industry really has a moral obligation to get things right and to do better. I guess I’m going to date myself a little bit here, but the Americans with Disabilities Act predates me, and so I, in theory, should have never lived a day in my life facing any kind of discrimination. We all know that’s not true and I am paying for the mistakes of architects and designers who did really bad things for a very long time and made a really inaccessible world. And this is really unique opportunity for us to do better and we really have no excuses. We are creating digital products and a platform in an age where we know what we need to do. We need to be inclusive to people with disabilities and bring people with disabilities to the table and think about it throughout the thought process. We talked a lot about users with disabilities, you know, people with disabilities are the largest minority, so, we are really missing an opportunity to reach all of those users when we’re not thinking about accessibility and disability inclusion.
Srin Madipalli:
I don’t have a huge amount more to add but I think the key thing is, yeah, it’s about tapping a pool of talent that I think is often overlooked and is not maximizing on such great opportunities in that and I think as Sunday mentioned, the tech industry has incredible power and influence in the world at the moment and as that classic Spider Man… With power comes responsibility. I think it can’t be denied, right? The level of influence that we as an industry have, I think we can also have a huge amount of positive impact if we get things right.
Natasha Walton:
Agreed. Thanks for that. Sunday, in a recent article in Diverseability Magazine, you shared that Salesforce has a long range plan to become a best place to work for people with disabilities. What could you share with us about that plan?
Sunday Parker:
Yeah, so it’s actually really exciting. Last week was probably the most exciting week of my career, really. A project that we’ve been working on for several years, which started with Abilityforce, our Employee Resource Group, is to really create a formalized plan for accessibility across the company and how we’re going to really focus on those different initiatives. So, we, just last week, coinciding with National Disability Employment Awareness Month, have announced the Office of Accessibility, which we have three open positions currently open, including a director role, a manager of compliance, and workforce development manager. So, if anyone is interested feel free to look that up on our career site, just by looking up accessibility. This is really exciting because this really started as the grassroots side of working on accessibility from the company from the ground up and now we’ve really expanded to leadership adoption. So, as we look to become one of the best work places for people with disabilities, this is really the start of that process and creating formal office and it’s really going to give us an opportunity to focus on accessibility.
Natasha Walton:
That’s so fantastic to hear. Srin, you’re spearheading the efforts at Airbnb to make travel more accessible for everyone. What’s your strategy for driving change within the Airbnb ecosystem?
Srin Madipalli:
Yeah, great question but I think it comes from a multitude of avenues. I think one is being a product team and a business center within the company, does give us a lot of… It does give us an influential position to advocate across the company and across the host and guest communities at Airbnb. So, we make product changes to make travel easier and those changes cascade through the network and the ecosystem. That is the first bit. And then the second, we have tried to build our team as a center of expertise and know-how, to even maybe slightly outside of our domain as a product and business unit. We do a lot of work to help educate other teams within Airbnb, help get them excited about our work, help get them socialized into the opportunities that are there, how they can learn more, and how they can evangelize within their teams. So, it’s a mixture of just building things and making something better to use than when previously it was not great, to actually fixing some of the table stakes stuff…how do we get everybody excited and motivated about this work?
That actually… it takes time and especially when the organization is as large as it is now. Yeah, it’s definitely a work in progress, but in the last eighteen months, two years, since our team was launched we’ve been able to get a lot of the company really aligned and excited about this area.
Natasha Walton:
Congratulations. That’s great. Iris, you were the first person at Mixpanel to express interest in starting a disability ERG, as you mentioned. Why did you choose to disclose your disability status upon joining your company and how has that decision impacted your work?
Iris McLeary:
I spent five months between my previous job and my current job recovering and processing. I lost my previous job for performance reasons and I spent five months recovering, and while there are things that could have been handled a lot better on the employer’s side, I realized that part of it was that I felt like I could not be fully myself at work during those final few months. There were things going on in my life that were impacting me very deeply that I just could not talk about. And there were things that the people who were evaluating me didn’t know and couldn’t have known.
That was a really tough realization and over those five months, as I was getting ready to start actually job searching again, I realized that I didn’t want to feel like that anymore and I didn’t want to go through that again and one of my non-negotiables moving forward, in addition to the fact that I’m covered in tattoos and more likely to show up wearing a punk shirt than a button down…and I swear like a sailor at work honestly. But one of my non-negotiables is that I’m mentally ill, twice over. It just is a thing about me and it’s not a thing I’m going to keep my mouth shut about. And I need accommodations, and they’re not something I would have asked for in the past, but it has made all the difference in the world. For the people around me to know, for the people who are managing me to know, for everyone up to our executives to know. And to see that sometimes I’m showing up to work when I don’t have a whole lot to give, and they can still appreciate that that is what I’m doing, and that I’m giving what I have to give, and I’m taking care of myself, so that tomorrow I will still have something to give.
Watching that percolate outward through the company, both as something that a lot of people already acknowledged but didn’t necessarily talk about, and as something that more and more people are becoming aware of. That we’re all just showing up and doing our best. That has been incredibly powerful to make it a safe space for me to show up to every single day.
Natasha Walton:
That’s incredibly powerful, thank you for sharing with us. Govind, you’re the Executive Sponsor for AccessAdobe. Could you tell us more about the important role of that executive sponsors can play in increasing access for both employees and customers?
Govind Balakrishnan:
Yeah, sure. One of the tenants that I hold true to as a leader is, that if you can, as a leader, create a safe environment where everyone can be themselves, everyone is confident that they are treated with respect, and will treat others the way they would like to be treated, where they feel confident with expressing their ideas freely, and more importantly, expressing themselves freely, and being supported along the way, then, in more ways than one, in every sense of the word, it translates to them doing their best work. And I think the onus is on all of us to ensure that we provide that environment wherever you work. Taking that a step further, I felt like it was an opportunity when Sucheta contacted me and asked me if I could lead this network within Adobe. I felt like I had an opportunity to make that real for a larger group of people, even people outside my own team. That, in more ways than one, is how I started contributing to the Adobe Access network.
I started off by saying at some level we have to try to find a way to drive more awareness and empathy within the company. It’s starts with that. When there’s more empathy, when there’s more awareness, people tend to be more accepting, and then we can talk about how we make our workplace more accessible and more approachable. And that’s easier said than done. I was mentioning to someone a few minutes back that the plates that we have in this cafeteria were found to be very heavy for certain people with certain forms of illnesses or disabilities. How do you fix that? How do you address that? The stairways, the elevators, the bathrooms, all of that, how do you make it so they are more accessible?
Then we can talk about our products and how we make them more accessible and approachable to a broader audience, people who are colorblind, and this is something that we tend to forget all the time. I often get emails from people saying “My changes are in green.” But what if that goes to a person who is colorblind? There is no concept of green. So, how do you make it so that everyone in the organization is always thinking about how they make the products that they build more approachable, more accessible, to everyone? Lastly, one of the things that we have tried really hard to focus on is to work with the community, and I touched on this earlier, but work with the community to make them more employable, help them use our tools, help them tap into their creativity. Adobe is a creative company. How can we share our tools with a larger audience of people to help them express their creativity in ways that they probably couldn’t? Maybe our products were too hard to use. What if we could try to help them learn how to use our products so that they can find avenues to express their creativity more seamlessly and easily?
So, those are some of the things that I’ve held to, that I’ve tried to push forward with, obviously, help from a number of people within Adobe, Sucheta being one of them, and I think it’s something that I’d really like to see more of across the industry.
Natasha Walton:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). That’s awesome to hear about a product leader being so connected to the agenda of people with disabilities. Sunday, folks with disabilities often wonder how, when, and whether to disclose their disability status at work or during the interview process. What advice to you have when it comes to disclosing a disability in a professional context, whether as an interviewee or an employee?
Sunday Parker:
Yeah, I’m happy to share my own experience and if you are a person with a disability and you have this question I would recommend getting the perspective of some other folks who have been down this path. I’m happy to share my own advice and the way I’ve approached it, and that has changed over time as I’ve interviewed at different companies, but in the initial interview process, I do not need any accommodations, so I typically do not disclose my disability. Whether it be a phone interview or Skype interview, it’s just not necessary for me to disclose that information. But I think if you are a person that needs an accommodation from the start, I think it’s best for you to be open and up front about that from the beginning, because that’s really going to set you up for success in the interview process. I have been on receiving end of emails with folks who have… recruiters and such, who have reached out to me because they have a candidate that disclosed they were in a wheelchair and they asked me what advice I have to make them most successful in the process. And we have FAQs and best practices to help them.
So, that time, I think it was really helpful that that candidate did disclose, because while I would hope that every single recruiter that we have at the company would provide an amazing experience for candidates with disabilities, I think it’s still best that we do know about it so we can set them up for success. One of the things I have done is, when doing an on site interview, I have let the person know that I’m meeting that I am in a wheelchair, and that’s mostly because, you know, just in case they book a conference room with a higher table, or just a smaller space, they can rethink that and plan accordingly. Though, I have showed up on site not disclosing my disability before, and it’s gone okay as well. So, I think that’s something that is completely up to the individual and what you’re comfortable with. I will say, I think it’s better to disclose just so that person is aware because I think it kind of takes the stress off of your shoulder as a candidate to have to think about one thing less.
Particularly, about accommodations, I in the past have accepted a job offer without requesting any accommodations. And when I did come on Day 1, I then asked for those accommodations and did not receive them. So, what I did, starting with Salesforce, and what I will do in the rest of my career, is I will never sign a job offer until I have written conformation that that company will honor my reasonable accommodations. And I get that in writing as well.
Natasha Walton:
Thanks for that. That’s really important. Srin, when the company you founded was acquired by Airbnb, you relocated from London to San Francisco. What are some differences between how the government upscales people with disabilities in the UK versus the US, and what changes would you like to see here in San Francisco?
Srin Madipalli:
Yeah, sure. When I came over here it was one of the biggest surprises for me. Growing up in the UK, in Europe, it is very much a different system where there is a greater degree of government intervention and support at all levels. So, for instance, let’s say, if you have a disability, and you can’t use public transport to get to the office, the government will pay for you to have a taxi to and from the office every day. The biggest one for me is my care support. So, for folks with disabilities, like me, who are dependent on round the clock care and nursing support, and again for most of my life this was provided by the state, free of charge, not in-contested and so all the additional costs of having a disability were not born by me or my employer. Those costs were born by the government, basically.
So, when I was moving over to the US, it was a surprise to me that there wasn’t any real level of support in terms of the financial assistance that I guess I’d been spoiled on to be frank, and got quite used to. And I think that is a bigger question that I noticed, that in the US people don’t talk about, is actually less about accommodations, ADA, and everything…but how do you get the state to actually invest in people? And I think unless you have that systemic foundation of investment in people, it is very difficult to upscale into getting them into a role, because my biggest worry is, all of the companies here today, we may have the most inclusive, amazing, fair employment policies, but if people with disabilities are not in a position where they can get out of bed in the morning to go and learn, get educated, learn skills, have some transport to get into the office in the morning, I feel that is a great worry for me. Even just little things. You look at the sidewalks on Brannan Street, they are in absolutely atrocious condition. I have a fellow wheelchair user on my team, a wheel got stuck in a curb because there’s a massive pothole in it.
So, these are nothing to do with companies… These are foundational, civic, state based issues that I feel, if those are not fixed, it always is going to be a limiting factor to what we as ERGs and companies can do in the first place.
Natasha Walton:
Absolutely. There’s certainly a lot of different forces at play. Iris, working in the tech industry can be extremely demanding. Some company cultures encourage employees to push their bodies and brains beyond their limit. What does it look like for tech companies to be more inclusive, particularly when it comes to employees with chronic and mental illness?
Iris McLeary:
I was folding my laundry today and I actually ran across a shirt that references a meeting that is the perfect example of how to be more inclusive. Literally, my third day at the company was what has come to be known as the infamous offsite in our engineering product and design organization, where we pulled this huge organizational cultural pivot that would kind of engineer ourselves into a deep dark hole priority wise and out of it came, our then VP of Engineering, now VP of Product, Neil, saying we needed to move forward with “max power”.
I remember when he said this he was very careful to say literally in the next sentence, “This does not mean we are working until 3 am. This does not mean that we are working weekends. Unless you like working Saturdays instead of Mondays, in which case, be my guest. It means that when we are at work, this is where our focus is going. This is where our energy is going.”
In that moment, the fact that he took the time to realize how that directive might have been interpreted by some people, and walk that back and say, “No, this doesn’t mean that we are pulling all nighters, in fact I want you to do the opposite, because the worst thing we can do right now is burnout so early in this new initiative. I don’t want any of you to burn out. You give what you have to give, but you give it this direction now and we make a concerted effort in this direction.”
I think having a VP level executive make that very clear and make very clear that he values us taking care of ourselves and that no one should be working beyond their capabilities is huge piece of what it takes.
To dial back that culture, and, yeah, we have people that submit things at three in the morning. They are no where near the majority of the engineering workforce, and it’s a choice. They’re also usually showing up to work at like, eleven or noon. That’s just how they work, and that’s totally okay. It’s not that you can’t do things late at night. It’s also not that you have to do things late at night. And making that very very explicit from the highest levels on down is what it takes.
Natasha Walton:
That’s cool to hear about the level of personalization that employees are empowered to be able to craft with their employer. Thanks Iris. Govind, last year, research by Accenture, Disability:IN and the American Association of People with Disabilities revealed that disability hiring and inclusion has a positive impact on share holder returns. How should executives be thinking about the importance of disability hiring and increasing access at their companies?
Govind Balakrishnan:
I think this goes back to that fact that roughly one in six humans in the world has some form of disability, and if companies don’t take the time and effort to ensure that their products, their resources, meet the needs of that group of people, then it’s their loss, and I say shame on them. The sad part is most companies take way long to realize that, and take very long to take steps to address the gaps in their product or service portfolio. In sitting here today, hearing some of the comments that we have heard, it’s great to see that many of the companies that are represented here have taken steps or are taking active steps in that direction, but if you look across the tech industry, or even the broader industry, you’ll see that that’s not really true, because they don’t think about that largely untapped potential market.
So, I think there’s a huge value there, but I go back to, to do that right you have to make sure that you’re also working with the community, bringing the community in to work with you, hand in hand, to make sure that those products and services that are being built are being built right. That’s the second part that I think most companies and execs in the companies tend to forget, because they think that, and this holds true for any type of diversity and inclusion, they think that they can build products and services without necessarily having the right representation, the right diverse representation, within the room where the decisions are being made, where product decisions are being made. And that I feel is a fallacy in most situations, and when companies realize their fallacy, I think they start addressing those untapped potentials, and they actually start increasing diversity. So, I think that’s a huge opportunity for most companies.
Natasha Walton:
That’s a beautiful summary of the importance of diversity and inclusion in general. Thank you.
Well, I’ve got one final question for all of you. In your opinion what does a fully accessible workplace of the future look like? Srin, why don’t you kick us off?
Srin Madipalli:
Wow, great question. So, I think it is something that has been designed and created with the insights and input of people with disabilities in mind. It is an office place where all of these things have been baked in from the beginning, rather than something that has been retrofitted. And it is also something where if changes are needed, modifications are made, there are systems of funding and support in place to accommodate those employees in one way or another.
Sunday Parker:
Yeah, I think the pessimist in me is like, the answer to that doesn’t really exist. But, to build off of Srin, said perfectly — not everything is going to be fully accessible. It is really very challenging to create something that is truly universally accessible to everyone. There’s always going to be that need for accommodation. The one thing that companies can do better and get right is to build in that framework of accessibility and to think about how you make those modifications, and work with employees and customers with disabilities to meet them where they are. In addition to that, just having people at the table, and we talk a lot about how executive leadership is lacking diversity, well, when it comes to people with disabilities, we are not at the table at any level. I think we need to, of course, be at the leadership side in making those decisions and being included, but we also just need to have more people with disabilities in the workforce contributing their ideas.
Iris McLeary:
The first hurdle we need to overcome, especially in the United States, is definitely just basic physical accessibility. We’re in a world where the person who owns the building has no incentive to fix accessibility unless there’s a lawsuit involved, and no matter what the tenant feels is right, or what the tenant wants to do, they may not be able to fund it themselves, without triggering millions of dollars of code upgrades they can’t pay for. My company may currently be stuck in one of these annoying double binds, where we really want something to be accessible, but we literally cannot do it ourselves because we don’t own the building, and a truly accessible space has just the basic physically accessibility stuff taken care of. You can get into and out of the building, you can get between floors, you can get into all the rooms, and then beyond that, it’s flexibility. Maybe open office works great for someone, it is completely non-workable for someone else. You need access to, or at least the option to access, whatever would be possible for you to do your job and having that kind of flexible structure built in, I think, is what would make a work place truly accessible.
Govind Balakrishnan:
Yeah, I’m not sure there’s much more to add. I think you’ve all said a lot I completely agree with. Maybe one thing that I can add is, what would be really nice, if I were to look ahead, is for more empathy amongst people in the workplace. Yes, you can make your facilities, the buildings, the everything more accessible, no doubt, and you should, we should, we should all strive to do that, but at the end of the day there is a human element that I think gets forgotten, be it that there’s… having representatives at the table, as Sunday mentioned, or as Iris mentioned earlier, having people just recognize that not everyone is ready to operate at 100% or 200% every day. And just be accepting of that and recognize that, yes, you may not be at 100% today but how do we support you so that you’re back at 100% tomorrow or day after? Having that level of empathy, and making that front and center, and driving that awareness, around that empathy would be, I think, be the most magical thing that can happen from a workplace point of view. Not to take anything away from all the other things that have been said, but from my point of view, if we as humans across the globe can demonstrate that empathy, I feel like we’ll be in a far, far better place.
Natasha Walton:
I saw a lot of heads nodding along with each of those statements. It’s really exciting to think about creating that workplace together. Well, big thanks to each of you, not only for participating this evening and sharing all of this wisdom and experience, but for what you all do every day in your jobs for advocating for this community. We’re so thankful to have these champions, and all the folks here at this event, who are creating visibility for folks with disabilities in tech. So let’s please give our panelists a round of applause. I’d just also like to extend a very big thank you to Adobe for hosting us, particularly Sucheta, who has been mentioned. See put in an incredible amount of work to make this evening possible. Lindsay and Sheridan as well for doing ASL interpretation for us, and Interpreter Now, who’s the agency that we worked with.
