As an organization with a higher purpose, Salesforce touches many lives with its accessibility efforts to establish equality. It fosters transparency for all workplaces, and culture known to value and empower disadvantaged communities.
So, with the National Disability Employment Awareness Month coming up, we step back to look toward the Salesforce realm for efforts in this direction.
Challenges: The State Of Ability-Inclusion:
The spectrum and severity of disabilities, their visibility, awareness about them, as well as biases also present themselves as the source of most challenges.
What’s more, for the visually impaired, this could mean the dread of not being able to operate within busy, cluttered, and visually oriented environments. It could diminish participation entirely.
As statistics go, employment numbers are wholly dismal and betray negligence. So much work remains. Just 1-in-4 disabled adult Americans find work and differently-abled adults are two times as likely to live in hardship as those without a disability.
Contrary to this, Salesforce abides by specific accessibility standards and ideals to pursue the goal of equitable workplaces and universally accessible design. We turn to some initiatives Salesforce took on to actualize this and take a closer look.
Salesforce for Good:
Fortune recognizes Salesforce as the best place for workplace diversity. No prizes for guessing (It was inevitable with their outlook towards equality, transparency, and workforce diversity). It sits well with any plans to create an equitable workspace for PWDs.
Also, it nurtures a culture of support and advocacy for one another.
Research too has shown that this leads to higher employee satisfaction and performance.
Ohana Resource Groups- Abilityforce:
Ohana groups take after ‘Ohana’ which means family in Hawaiian.
The Ohana Groups offer mentorship and professional opportunities so as to empowers employees to be compassionate leaders in their community.
Of these, Abilityforce is an employee resource and affinity group that unites those with visible and invisible disabilities and their families, along with all their allies.
Together, they innovative over practices that solve customer and employee needs. That includes ensuring the accessibility of physical and technological environments for all.
Their purpose is to improve accessibility with their technology, workplace, and events, so employees everywhere feel empowered in their abilities. They could then work to advance the dialogue on accessibility and accommodation policies, and champion causes close to them.
Last year’s Dreamforce – accessibility through events:
With Abilityforce, Dreamforce is committed to becoming the most accessible tech event in the world. And they’ve as much as pulled out all stops to realize this at Dreamforce 2018.
To that end, they tried to make the event more accessible were breakout sessions with employees with individual seats reserved for PWDs, presence of ASL interpreters and closed captions all through the keynote. Also present were rest stops for attendees, wheelchair readiness, and guide dogs.
In general, the intention was to create a resource group to shoulder the needs of impaired customers, to inspire and help people to rise above their challenges, and deliver meaningful solutions for their organizations.
Accessibility through Design:
Salesforce abides by specific accessibility standards and ideals to pursue the goal of universally accessible design.
In that vein, Lightning Experience provides several out-of-the-box accessibility innovations. These include magnification and zoom settings for Low-Vision users, alternative color palettes for the colorblind, record navigation through keyboard shortcuts, and captions for videos.
Additionally, built-in features in Lightning Experience augment guidance tech like screenreaders.
ACRs (Access Conformity Reports) also document and guide the assessment of Salesforce products against accessibility standards for those with disabilities.
Business aspects of equal access:
Research shows it’s good business sense to step up accessibility. Altogether, companies that hire and encourage persons with disabilities in their workforces greatly exceed their counterparts, with 28% greater income and twice the profit.
Likewise, companies with active diversity plans and equal pay edge-out those that don’t.
Further, there is a substantial overlap between accessibility improvements and best practices. As a consequence of these practices and associated training, we see improvements in familiarity, navigation, efficiency, and productivity.
Getting ‘access’ off the ground:
Significant disparity in the awareness about these issues. It makes developing for universal accessibility harder.
To combat this efficiently, it is advisable to include accessibility adjustments in the initial development. That makes it easier for subsequent iterations of an application to add improvements to them without making any significant changes.
Also, Lightning Base Components and the Lightning Design System work best for developing accessibility.
Access is an enablement imperative:
Undoubtedly, better accessibility fosters inclusion and a sense of belonging. It puts users at ease in bringing their most comfortable and talented selves to work. More importantly, physical limitations mustn’t obstruct someone from exercising the full extent of the mind and its capabilities.
It is for change-makers and big tech to deliver on the promises of enablement, change, and inclusion.
Ultimately, Salesforce is bound, as are all businesses, to make working environments and technological platforms welcoming for people facing any limitations.
