My daughter Tori is on the severe end of the autism spectrum. I love her, and I won’t pretend the world was built for her. That’s what set me on my quest, searching for an answer to the question I’ve been chasing for years, and it’s a harder one than people expect from a CEO. When we leave barriers up, who else loses?
The answer is everyone.
I lead Northwest Center. We don’t run on sympathy or charity. We run competitive businesses where people with and without disabilities work side by side. The return on inclusion we experience is very real, but to convince people requires evidence. So, in addition to our data I also pay close attention to what the research says, and the research is not subtle. When Walgreens opened a distribution center where more than a third of the workforce had a disability, it became one of the most productive centers in the company, with the lowest safety incident rate. The U.S. Department of Labor finds that when an employer accommodates a worker with a disability, 85% of employers say it helped them keep a valued employee, and about half report higher productivity. Study after study of companies that lead on disability inclusion turns up the same pattern, higher revenue, and stronger profit margins. Take down the barriers and provide things like ramps and screen readers, and create a hiring process that looks at ability instead of assumption, and you don’t just do right by people with disabilities. You win because of disability inclusion, not despite it.
There’s a pattern worth noticing here. Curb cuts were built for wheelchairs. Now they carry strollers, delivery carts and anyone hauling a roller bag through downtown. Talking to your phone was built for people who can’t use a keyboard. Now it’s how the rest of us send a text at a red light or set a timer with our hands covered in flour. Every time we make the world work for someone like Tori, we make it work better for all of us. That isn’t a favor to anyone. That’s good design.
So here’s my challenge to every employer and every organization reading this. Suspend your disbelief. Stop treating access as a cost you absorb and start treating it as value you’ve been leaving on the table. Don’t wait for a mandate. Don’t wait until you feel ready. Lean in and do the work.
Removing barriers matters to people with disabilities. I know that better than most. But it doesn’t just matter to us. It matters to you, your team, your customers, and the bottom line.
We’ve come a long way over the decades. The ramps and the curb cuts prove it. But plenty of barriers remain, and the ones that matter most now are the ones that might not be obvious to you. A PDF or website that isn’t compatible with a screen reader, or an online form with unlabeled fields, inaccessible instructions, or features that can’t be completed using a keyboard. These barriers can prevent people with disabilities from applying for a job, requesting an accommodation or accessing workplace information. We owe it to ourselves, to our employees, and to the people we work alongside to keep looking for and obliterating those barriers. And when we can’t spot them on our own, we owe it to listen to the people who run into them every day.
