Accommodations and compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) are both vital components of a disability-accessible workplace. But these actions are simply the baseline of what HR can do to improve accessibility at work. True accessibility requires a cultural shift and a commitment from the entire workforce to pave the way for employees with disabilities to reach their full potential at your organization.

That requires a strategic commitment to building an infrastructure that supports individuals with disabilities. “October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month,” says Jocelyn Hunter, senior director of communications at Columbia Lighthouse for the Blind, “but it needs to be recognized more than just once a year.”

“This is a topic that means a lot to me. I’ve worked with Columbia Lighthouse for the Blind for years and am currently chair at the organization. I’ve seen the tremendous value that individuals with disabilities can bring to any workplace. Now we need to do the work to redefine accessibility to support employees with disabilities.”

“Accessibility can mean many things,” says Roselle Rogers, SPHR, vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion at Circa. “We need to be thinking about it in a very global way.” Some disabilities are invisible, especially those related to cognition and mental health. By improving accessibility in a global way, HR teams can create a workplace where each and every employee can become their most productive self.

Designing a disability-inclusive workplace for individuals with disabilities is imperative ethically and as a strategic business move. Here are five ways your HR team can improve accessibility at your work environment.

Audit Existing HR Policies and Documents

When was the last time you audited job descriptions for accessibility, or even for relevance? In a rapidly evolving workplace, job roles and duties shift. Make sure the job descriptions and postings you use to recruit employees are accurate — especially in regards to core job functions.

“Assess job descriptions and job applications for accessibility,” says Mario Burton, GPHR, vice president of people and culture at LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired. If a job doesn’t actually require driving as a core job function, for example, then a driver’s license shouldn’t be a requirement. Candidates with visual impairments are less likely to apply to jobs with that requirement, causing you to lose out on those otherwise qualified individuals.

Many HR processes are legacy processes (like the annual review, for example). They may have been functional at the time they were implemented, but the world of work is vastly changed. We know more now about how to be inclusive. Too often, however, we fail to update documents to reflect our new reality.

To improve accessibility at work, review current HR processes to see what might be unintentionally and unnecessarily excluding employees with disabilities. This also gives you an opportunity to pinpoint policies and processes that can be optimized for efficiency and productivity.

If you don’t have the time to dedicate to a complete audit, take a few minutes to review job descriptions and processes individually in the flow of work. As you post a job opening, for example, audit the job description to ensure that it’s accessible and up-to-date. After all, if even your company’s most recent posting seems to exclude individuals with disabilities, why should any potential applicant expect a welcoming environment?

As you prepare for open enrollment, review the technology where employees will select their benefits. For example, is that software accessible to screen readers? If the website isn’t accessible, what types of accommodations or assistive technology could you provide to improve it?

Perhaps most importantly, get into the habit of thinking critically about documents, tools and policies from an accessibility perspective. This way you will recognize potential problems immediately and can address them before they become issues.

Design Processes and Policies for Intersectionality

Since COVID, we’ve entered an era of employee choice and flexibility. We can harness that trend to improve accessibility at work, especially as we rework policies and processes for hybrid workplaces.

Many of us are redesigning workplace norms, from the way meetings are structured to when and where employees log in for work. Traditionally, universal design has been the gold standard for accessibility. But lately there’s been a trend in user experience towards intersectional design.

Intersectional design is a form of design thinking that takes individual identities, circumstances, behaviors and environments into account when anticipating user needs. It results in a more flexible approach that can be customized to meet individual needs. “We need to show up for individuals,” Burton declares. This is a superb way to do so.

HR processes and policies can be designed for intersectionality. To use intersectional design at your company, however, you first need to know your workforce’s specific needs. As Rogers observes, “If you don’t have an idea of what barriers there are in your organization, how are you going to work towards removing them?”

Self-disclosure, especially of invisible disabilities, is important for designing processes and policies that produce the biggest benefits for your workforce. It is crucial that employees feel comfortable sharing this information. Be sure they understand that if they do disclose a disability, the information will be collected anonymously and only viewed in the aggregate. By surveying the workforce and understanding employee needs, HR can offer more options to customize work processes, policies, benefits and rewards.

There is also a way to discover what measures might assist employees that is both more direct and allows them to avoid disclosing their disabilities. Val Golan, GPHR, managing director and growth and HR business partner at GoLAN Consulting, notes that if you ask employees what might benefit them they will likely tell you just that. For example, asking employees how they work best can help employees with ADHD find accommodations (like being able to wear a noise-canceling headset at their desk) without even having to disclose a disability.

Move Beyond Compliance to Culture

HR might own compliance initiatives, but culture is everyone’s responsibility. Cultures can be deeply unwelcoming. Acceptance is a vital dimension of accessibility at work, Golan points out. “There’s a long list of barriers to acceptance and accessibility embedded in the attitude of people,” she says. This is especially true for people with invisible disabilities, who may not be taken seriously by their colleagues. That attitude can undermine even the best compliance and accommodation initiatives.

HR cannot completely control the culture, of course, but it can facilitate a more accessible one. The key is to ask employees how they can support them and normalize conversations around disabilities. Sharing information is also essential. Education can bridge that gap between us and those we perceive as different. While disability training isn’t mandated like other types of diversity or anti-harassment training, Golan says it should become a regular part of your learning and development program. 

“Creating an accessibility culture means that every single person is provided training and opportunity to learn what accessibility is,” Burton says. When everyone has a shared language around and understanding of disability, it becomes easier to normalize disability conversations. That normalization, in turn, makes it easier for employees with disabilities to exist and succeed in your company.

This is especially important when training executives and managers. “There’s more work to be done within executive management,” says Tony Cancelosi, president and CEO at Columbia Lighthouse for the Blind.

Connect disability awareness training to the company’s code of ethics. If you haven’t updated your code of ethics recently, consider revisiting it this year. The ethics code can serve as a useful guide… or just lead to more confusion. “In the absence of a clear ethics code, it’s sometimes unclear to managers what the right course of action is,” Golan says.

In general, you should avoid leaving any questions regarding disability at work up to interpretation. If you find yourself facing a question you’re struggling to answer, ask qualified external sources for support. “Seek out leaders and experts within the disability community for guidance,” Hunter says.

The Job Accommodation Network (JAN), for example, offers free consulting to businesses. The American Association of People with Disabilities, as well as organizations dedicated to supporting individuals with specific disabilities, can offer feedback and advice on creating a more accessible and accepting culture.

Ideally, you will create a true culture of accessibility. In an accessible workplace culture, everyone is educated on disabilities — and everyone takes responsibility for pointing out places and policies that can be improved. Any employee should be able to recognize when a break room isn’t wheelchair accessible.

While workplace accessibility is ultimately HR’s responsibility, it becomes a far more manageable task when everyone advocates for their colleagues. Indeed, the most accessible workplaces ensure their employees play a key role in recognizing areas that need improvement.

Sponsor a Resource Group for Employees With Disabilities

Affinity groups, or employee resource groups, give employees from marginalized communities a voice in the workplace. Members of a disability affinity group, for example, can help inform HR of items that need to change to improve accessibility at work. “We have an accessibility working group whose main point is to create that accessibility culture,” Burton says. “It gives some agency back to employees.”

Affinity groups can help normalize seeing employees with disabilities active in the workplace, which supports a strong culture of accessibility. Group members become culture ambassadors for their peers with disabilities, creating more visibility for people with disabilities in the workplace.

It’s important that affinity groups are not isolated or marginalized. Group members should also feel part of the larger culture. Sponsored education and social events for the rest of the workforce can help employees get to know affinity group members as individuals rather than just representatives or even stereotypes of a group.

Affinity groups should receive a budget for professional development and education for member employees, which can help employees with disabilities move into roles they want to hold. Financial support and executive sponsorship sends a strong signal to the rest of the workforce that the company values and wants to elevate employees with disabilities, Burton says.

Create Leadership Pathways for Employees With Disabilities

Many employees with disabilities are underemployed. Their employment at your company may be their first role, so be sure to create pathways for them to experience different roles and responsibilities across the company. In particular, there should be consideration of how they can advance their careers. Design your work processes for accessibility today, but also plan on supporting employees with disabilities as they get promoted and assume leadership roles.

It’s important to define what upward mobility truly looks like for people with disabilities, Cancelosi says. HR team members should help pinpoint the specific skills, traits and aptitudes that each employee brings. Once those have been identified, lay out defined options for career mobility. Then provide opportunities for employees with disabilities to learn and grow so they can decide where they want to go within the company.

As part of an affinity group or diversity and inclusion program, consider having executives sponsor individual employees with disabilities who are interested in leadership roles. The sponsors can help them gain the experiences and opportunities they need to take on these positions in the future.

Finally, ask existing leaders who have disabilities, visible or invisible, to consider sharing their own experiences. “Storytelling is very powerful,” Rogers says. “We can talk about the concept at a very high level, but it’s when you actually hear the story that you start to understand.”

By improving accessibility at work, we can create more inclusive and resilient workplaces that are welcoming to people of all backgrounds and abilities. It provides those individuals well-deserved opportunities, but also benefits businesses by utilizing the talents of groups overlooked for far too long.