Without Digital Equity, Is There a Career Path for Visually Impaired People?

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VOICEOVER: Without Digital Equity, Is There a Career Path for Visually Impaired People? Speakers, Mike Hess, founder and executive director of the Blind Institute of Technology. Sarah Mark, manager of workforce development programs for people with disabilities at Salesforce. And moderator, Mason Ameri, author and professor with Rutgers University.

MASON AMERI: Thanks, Karae and Ross. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Mason Ameri, moderator for today’s discussion. I’m a professor at Rutgers Business School, and I specialize in disability employment. I’d like to start by extending a big thank you to Sight Tech Global for hosting this event and creating a space for such important conversations on accessibility and workforce development. We’re excited to dive into today’s discussion with our esteemed guests, Sarah Mark and Mike Hess. Now, before we dive in, I’d like to start by saying thank you to all of you for joining us today. Before we dive in, Sarah and Mike, could you each briefly introduce yourselves and share a bit about your background? Sarah, why don’t we start with you and then followed by Mike?

SARAH MARK: Sure. Thank you, Dr. Ameri. I’m Sarah Mark. I’m the Director of Workforce Development for People with Disabilities at Salesforce in the Office of Accessibility. I’ve been in my role there for, well, we can count it from exactly the first day of lockdown of the pandemic. That’s when I started. So, it’s been a really exciting four years, and I’ve done most of my work in partnership with Mike, who you’ll hear from next.

MIKE HESS: Awesome. Thank you, doctor. Thank you, Sarah. My name is Mike Hess. I’m Executive Director and founder at a Colorado-based nonprofit making a global difference called Blind Institute of Technology. Full disclosure, team. I’ve been legally blind or blind my entire life. That is why the shades, it’s not for the cool factor, although they’re cool. So, and I’ve been in tech my entire career, so 30 years plus. And at Blind Institute of Technology, we help professionals with disabilities level up their skill sets within the Salesforce ecosystem and then ultimately finding them employment in the Salesforce economy.

MASON AMERI: Well, I’m thrilled to have you both. Each of you is doing important work that embodies business as a platform for change, particularly through using technology for good. So, to set the stage, could you share if there was a specific moment early in your life or career that inspired you to pursue the work you’re doing now? Why don’t we start with Sarah?

SARAH MARK: Sure. You know, I have to say that my career path is one of those where it only makes sense. Looking back at it, it’s not really a trajectory I can endorse anyone else, try and replicate. It just sort of wound up this way. My background actually was in community-based mental health. I was working as a clinician and a supervisor and then a training director in a number of community-based service organizations. After a while, I started to transition more into that learning and training space. And that kind of led me into career development. And I was running a program in San Francisco that helped us train and provide soft skills training, technical training, and soft skills training for unemployed and underemployed San Franciscans, which, perhaps to no surprise, was very focused on the tech space. So, that was sort of how I got my combination of factors that led me into this role of working with people with disabilities of all types, including mental health disabilities. And then working in the career-oriented space. And those two things just kind of came together in this position that I have here at Salesforce, which, again, I can’t recommend that anyone try and replicate because I don’t know that there’s another job quite like this in any other company. So, I’m really lucky. And I think that just saying yes to the things that you’re interested in and passionate about is the only sort of piece of advice that I can suggest that anyone try and follow.

MASON AMERI: Yeah, thank you for sharing. And Mike?

MIKE HESS: Sure. So, again, because I was born legally blind from first grade on. And I was legally blind before that. However, it was first grade at the school district that I was in, in Northeast Ohio, where they did the testing for, you know, they sent all the kids down in the 70s for the first graders to put your head in some helmet. And that’s when, you know, kind of the process of me finding out that my eyesight was where it was. But so, I started out legally blind and then the rest of my eyesight just continued to deteriorate over my life. And this was before, you know, again, this is way before Americans with Disabilities Act. You know, that that journey began. And I ended up, like, in school, again, integration for people with disabilities looks different depending on the zip code that you live in here in the United States. And so, the school system accommodated me loosely with my needs. However, when I was finishing up high school, like, I was reading at probably a sixth or seventh grade level. Just because of the services that I needed to really help me throughout my educational journey, they weren’t really there. But I had two teachers, math teachers, that could see that I had affinity for logic and I could do math and that sort of thing in my head. And so, when I graduated, it was actually 1990. And so, it was the year that the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed. Well, so, what’s critical about that is, so, IBM was the first tech stack company in the world to actually fully embrace, like, the Americans with Disabilities Act. And they sent grant dollars to a handful of community colleges across the country. And one happened to be the Community College of Denver, which my mom had relocated my brother and I to the Denver metro area. And so, they didn’t call it workforce development in the early 90s. But that’s exactly what it was. And it was a training called computer training for people with disabilities. So, and I do not have a college degree. Although, tech is one. There’s amazing ecosystems and verticals that, you know, through a concept called cert stacking or certification stacking, you could truly build a career. And so, and the other thing that was happening, little did we know, was the first technology bubble was being created globally due to Y2K or year 2000. And so, like, this confluence of, you know, this nexus of all these things happening. And so, my first gig in private industry, Fortune 5. Fortune 6 in our brands was changing two-digit date fields to four-digit date fields. That was a thing back in the day. And so, you know, so if you could spell Y2K and you had any kind of coding skills, like, that was the beginning of my career. And I ended up managing. I got more certifications in tech, managed more programs, more projects. But, you know, what was always evident to me, what got me to BIT was the fact that I was always the token blind person. And quite honestly, like, I don’t remember. I don’t remember anybody using sign language as their primary means of communication. I never bumped into anybody with a wheelchair with my cane. Neurodivergence was absolutely not talked about, let alone other, you know, hidden disabilities like anxiety or depression. Like, those were always omitted from conversations in private industry in my experience. And so, as I was just getting into my 40s, I wanted to do something, you know, like, to address, to me, what I call the unemployment epidemic for the broad. Or people with disabilities community. And so, it was, you know, after talking it over with the support of my best friend and better half, I, you know, I left my six-figure income to start Blind Institute of Technology, which addresses the unemployment epidemic for people with disabilities, not only here in the United States, but globally.

MASON AMERI: Thank you both for sharing amazing origin stories, truly. This next question is also for both of you. Why don’t we start with Mike first? What do you see as the most significant barrier or barriers for people with disabilities in the job market? And how do your programs aim to address these challenges?

MIKE HESS: Sure. It’s stigma and perception. Like, it’s, I, you know, I’m out there hustling and I travel with my cane and Uber and airplanes. I go anywhere that, you know, organizations will have me. And I do that. You know, again, as the blind guy, getting out of the Ubers, getting into planes, going from city to city, because of breaking down stigmas and perceptions for people with disabilities as a whole, right? And so, it is, so we as a protected class, so we, the disability community, as a protected class, we’re the only protected class that has to, and when we’re talking, you know, so gender, ethnicity, relationship orientation, all immensely important. This is not the poor me Olympics. Where it’s harder to be blind than it is to be, you know, gay or lesbian or a person of color. Like, this isn’t, that’s not this conversation. This is just what people with disabilities, we are the only protected class that has to ring a very legal nebulous bell called reasonable accommodation. And so, you take the stigma and perception and you add it in with this, in reasonable accommodation, organizations immediately think risk. And as they should, right? But they’re thinking about it from that gatekeeper risk lens, not realizing, like, the vast majority of individuals don’t realize that, you know, as a blind person, like, if you’re an organization that has Salesforce, Salesforce is the reasonable accommodation. Most people in HR that are those gatekeepers, right, addressing risk from a reasonable accommodation lens, they don’t know that, right? So, we’ve got to break down the stigma and perception, and then we’ve got to educate, bring awareness to organizations about what reasonable accessible accommodations are and are not.

MASON AMERI: Fantastic. And Sarah, you?

SARAH MARK: I will double down on what Mike is saying, of course. And, you know, I think I can even take it one step further and say there’s stigma and perception, and then there’s discrimination and implicit bias that prevents people from actually having the opportunities that they should have available to them. So, a big part of what we do is just trust. Try and, like Mike was saying, break down those barriers, break down the stigma, improve people’s awareness and education about what people with disabilities are capable of doing, the value add that they bring to your company, all of the very strong business cases for hiring plans that are inclusive of people with disabilities, having disability inclusion be a focus of your DEI initiatives. All of those things, I think, are still in the very early inception stages when we think about how companies are addressing this issue or thinking about this issue or whether or not they’re thinking about this issue. Oftentimes we hear that we’re the first company that someone’s encountered that’s doing this type of work, and I feel very lucky to be in this role. And I also feel like that’s. That’s really sad. I wish there was a lot of folks doing the same type of work because it’s really a self-perpetuating system. It’s like, the more people with disabilities you get into your field, the better your field becomes, the stronger it becomes, and the more accessible and inclusive it is.

MASON AMERI: Yeah, I mean, in riffing about Salesforce as an accessibility trailblazer, Sarah, could you tell us? About why and how Salesforce has invested in workforce development for people with disabilities in the recent years?

SARAH MARK: Yeah, so, well, I guess I can start by saying that equality is one of our core values at Salesforce, and the way that has been proven out is through the creation of the Office of Accessibility, which came about just shortly before I was hired. So that was back. End of 2019, just slightly pre-pandemic, and it was an employee-driven initiative, essentially, so part of our one of our BRGs, AbilityForce, is comprised of employees at Salesforce with disabilities and their allies, and we saw this, you know, strong, vibrant group of employees come together, put together an executive pitch saying there’s a lot of work that needs to be done here. And this is not work that should be considered VTO or extra nice-to-haves. This is really must-haves, and we were able to get executive support and funding to create the Office of Accessibility. I’ll talk a little bit about the Office of Accessibility and what our model looks like, because it’s not what people typically first imagine when they hear that. They think product accessibility, digital accessibility, like, that we’re, you know, remodeling. We’re running tests for assistive technology users. That’s actually not what our department does. We operate in a hub-and-spoke model. That means we have folks who are tasked with influencing every aspect of the entire company and pushing for disability inclusion and accessibility. So we have someone who’s focused on events. We have people who are focused on real estate, folks who are focused on hiring. And then my role is. My role is to be focused on the externally facing employment workforce development. So in our customer and partner ecosystem, folks are getting hired to implement Salesforce, and we want those jobs to be accessible and inclusive for people with disabilities. And so then my program also operates in sort of a similar fashion in another hub-and-spoke model, where we look to influence every aspect of the career seeker’s journey. So everything from learning about Salesforce as a career seeker. So everything from learning about Salesforce as a career option to the moment of hire and everything in between, we look at to make sure that there are as few or no obstacles as possible, and that it’s a welcoming, inclusive, and accessible space for people with disabilities. And we are. A big part of that is just getting the word out that this is a viable career path for people with disabilities, as Mike has pointed out, to address the unemployment epidemic and the disproportionate number of folks who are unemployed or underemployed in the disability community. And, you know, we’re hoping that some of our programming can really start to move the dial on that.

MASON AMERI: Understood. Yeah, it seems as though over at Salesforce, disability inclusion is in everything that you do. That’s fantastic. And so shifting gears, Mike, in discussing or rather unpacking the origins of the Blind Institute of Technology, would you mind sharing specifically how you empower people with visual impairment? How does your approach differ from broader disability workforce programs? And how has this focus contributed to your organization’s growth?

MIKE HESS: So, when we-and I think this is a kind of fundamental and philosophical difference from kind of how BIT, how BIT works. How the Blind Institute of Technology approaches everything that we do. So first of all, like we are the only consultancy agency in the world, great big spinning blue ball, that is completely comprised of professionals with disabilities. It’s not just people who are blind, low vision. Like we work side by side with people who are deaf. We work side by side with people who are bipolar. We work side by side with people in wheelchairs. Right? So we’re not fundamentally, philosophically, like the idea of, again, go back to accommodations, like we don’t say that we’re experts in accommodations. We’re just not afraid to talk about accommodations. And when you start with a level playing field, okay, so everything that we do, everything that we built on are from a digital equity perspective. Right? So that means from our productivity tools, we use, you know, platforms like Zoom and Google Meet. Okay? So these technology vendors, okay, have from a, you know, from a communications perspective, from a productivity suite perspective, they’ve embedded, you know, equity into their digital platforms to allow, again, pan-disability individuals. So our, so we deliver. Like our business model is super simple. Like we have an academy. It’s an educational forum. And it’s completely complementary to people with disabilities across the globe. Right? And we level people with disabilities, any disability, up into the level, into the Salesforce ecosystem by leveraging platforms that are already digitally equitable. Right? So we’re using digital equity to deliver a platform for workforce development that is also digitally equitable. Right? Like, so there’s nothing difficult. And then, so again, that all, there’s, there’s nothing fundamentally different from any other educational forum that’s out there. Absolutely nothing. Except for before, you know, before we launch anything, like we actually have this lens of like, okay, can people who are blind, low vision, can people who are deaf, can people like we, we, we fundamentally like, you know, we have this lens of like, okay, can people who are blind, low vision, can people who are deaf, can people like, we fundamentally like, we have this lens. Like we, we ask those questions because we want our services to serve this, this unemployment epidemic community. Right? Like, so that’s, so there’s nothing like there’s no secret sauce. It’s just being intentional. That’s all we did was we were intentional with this, so we could serve this amazing, what I call the greatest untapped human potential on the planet. Right? So, but there’s no secret sauce to anything that we’re doing. It’s just being intentional about it. It and then, so that’s our academy, and then that literally, like, that feeds our apprenticeship model, that feeds our employment model out there, and that’s where again going back to your first question, like, our biggest challenge and it’s an obstacles is not the obstacle. That’s what the world needs to know right. Is like, okay, so with digital equity, you as an organization are able to tap into this greatest untapped human potential on the planet. Like, you as an organization, like the reasonable accommodations, oh by the way, you have them in your workplace, like this is so that’s this is the great divide that we have. It’s awareness, it’s education, it’s not like, oh someday there’s going to be a technology now, Salesforce is that technology, Google meets is that platform, Zoom is that platform, like it just like it’s a like it’s we’re not missing digital and there are a lot more platforms that need to like be intentional about digital equity, but for what we do and how we’re approaching the epidemic, it’s all in place.

MASON AMERI: Yeah, it seems as though intentionality. Is the through line in what you’ve shared and that intentionality is really considerate towards the vast amount of human resources amongst people with disabilities, so Sarah on program expansion, um I’m curious how does Salesforce approach building workforce programs for the broader tech ecosystem?

SARAH MARK: Yeah, so like I said we’ve been around for four years, so it’s been a ramp-up, and it’s all been quite experimental. Right there wasn’t like it wasn’t as though this program already existed and we just stepped into it; um, we were sort of building it from the ground up at a time when um people were awfully focused on a broader global crisis was happening um with the pandemic and everything so i you know i think the way that we have expanded the community so far has been in in two different ways one is in our partnership with mike and the blind institute of technology basically i mean i i say to mike you’re the expert on this program on you’re the expert on teaching people who are assistive technology users how to become certified salesforce administrators developers and getting them jobs what can we do to help right so i because of my background in the business i’ve been in the business for a long time and i’ve been in the business for a long time and I’ve been in the nonprofit world, I know, um, I know very personally what it’s like to have helpers come in and tell you what to do, and so that is not my, that’s not that’s not my jam, that’s not what I wanted to do here. I wanted to come to them and say, ‘You know what you’re doing? Tell us how to help.’ Um, so we’ve done, we’ve done a lot of that sort of helping, to scale the program in a lot of different ways, just kind of greasing the wheels and and giving them more resources. And then, um, the other way is to reach out to the broader community and, um, in other disability serving organizations, and do something kind of similar. What would you need? To be able to provide this type of a training or to um get folks closer to an opportunity like this in the Salesforce ecosystem, so that’s from the workforce development angle, and how we think about our partnerships um with other training organizations; and then of course there is the the side of the house that has to look at product accessibility and digital accessibility, and that again like I said earlier does not fall under the office of accessibility but we work strong strongly uh in partnership with our product accessibility and inclusive design team which does work and focus on product itself making sure that Products are accessible, and when they’re not, this is another way that our partnership with Mike pays off. We have a really direct line-when something is not working correctly for an assistive technology user, we get to hear about it right away, and I’d say probably the first two years of our partnership, I was just telling Mike and everyone at Bit over and over again: please don’t flatter us; don’t tell me everything’s perfect and great. I want to hear about the things that aren’t working so that we can raise the attention and awareness to those uh areas and get them fixed and better-and do whatever we can to push. That’s forward because it doesn’t do us any good to pretend like things are better than they are, and you know what I love so much about our philosophy in the Office of Accessibility is none of us think we’re done; none of us want to hear that we’re done. This is all a better, better, better, never finished, uh, direction that we’re heading, and so we’re all really open to to hearing and talking about the ways that we can improve things.

MASON AMERI: You bring up an excellent point about challenges, and I’m curious, Mike, regarding the early challenges for bits as you were scaling your organization: what were some of the initial kind of hurdles?

MIKE HESS: you encountered you faced particularly in helping companies view hiring people with disabilities as a strategic advantage rather than a compliance measure well the challenges and uh their uh ever persisting uh challenges it’s one of the challenges i think is that um having a a partner a true partner and what’s so what’s so unique about this journey is so my background was all corporate and it was all mostly tech right now it was very very much from a user experience perspective right been blind visually impaired my whole life um and but i left to start a non-profit to address this unemployment epidemic so a lot of The challenges were nonprofit. Now, finding out that those, you know, what I thought were disadvantages, they actually were advantages because when I was able to go to, you know, Salesforce and other entities that we have relationships with, being able to speak their language is really a delineator. So there are a lot of organizations that are out there in the workforce development ecosystem. And it’s almost like their fundamental philosophy is to have, you know, corporations bend towards the nonprofit vernacular and terminology and all that. And quite honestly, like we speak, we BIT, we speak corporate, we speak Fortune 100, right? Like, that’s our language, that we’ve helped overcome what I thought were, you know, obstacles. But it’s our obstacles, like again, they’re easy, they’re easy to identify. And it’s yet there’s this, like we’re, we’re trying to change, you know, like people’s, like in some, some cultures, right? And you got to think United States and companies, they’re, they’re cultural melting pots, right? And there are some cultures in on the planet, right? And this isn’t like, you know, point now, like that’s bad. This is just what it is. Some cultures on the planet, they look at disability in a shameful way. Right? There are some cultures where, if you’re blind, and this is, you know, like, you’re blind, you’re like, these aren’t third-world countries, like, you’re, if you’re blind, like, you don’t have resources in, you know, in that those countries to even support people who are blind, like, you have to learn how to use your cane, literally on YouTube. Right? So there are so there are so many kinds of cultural things that we need to address as well. And so that’s, you know, this is the long game, right? This is not a sprint. This is just kind of an ultra-marathon kind of, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, we’re chipping away at so many of these components. And to me, how you do that is through success. To me, success will be got success. So we continue to show, like I said, we have a our delivery team is like, we’re delivering projects to global NGOs. Okay, and our projects were our project team is killing it for these, like 100% of our clients keep coming back to us because of the value that we’re offering. Right? So this is so like, to me, like, having the this kind of program where we can share this to the world that, you know, there are there are professionals with disabilities in the Salesforce ecosystem that are killing it. Right? So that this is how we continue to overcome those challenges, because the challenges are so numerous, but it all comes down to, again, some sort of stigma, perception, cultural belief, like, we have to be able to, like, we just have to stay stay true to our mission, which is providing professionals with disabilities employment opportunities, and then celebrate those successes. And we as a nonprofit, like we have to do a better job at all of that. However, it’s this kind of programming, getting the word out there, bringing awareness and education, like it’s not a lack of talent. It’s not like, and yes, Salesforce is not-they’re not the perfect digitally equitable environment. We know that. But they’re the-they’re the perfect partner, because they’re willing to hear when there’s blockers. Okay, so-so it’s the difference between saying like, Salesforce has arrived. Nope. But from an intentionality perspective, they’re there. And that’s it. And that’s getting more organizations to realize like you do this, because when an organization, like truly, like, brings the inclusion lens to the people with disabilities community to retain and recruit talent for retaining and recruiting talent. Like we know the statistics, they’re out there-28% higher revenue, okay, two times higher net operating income, like the statistics are there for businesses to truly embrace this. But the information hasn’t reached that tipping point yet.

MASON AMERI: Thank you for sharing that the whole concept of success leading to success leading to success is a contagion, right? It’s like it-it’s in a good way. It’s it’s it’s it’s this kind of effect that it has where people start to see the true value proposition of people with disabilities, right in discussing success. I have questions for each of you, Sarah, for companies to invest in workforce development programs, they need to see measurable impact, right, kind of referring back to what Mike was saying moments ago. How does Salesforce evaluate the success of its workforce development initiatives? Could you share some key metrics, or perhaps success stories that emphasize highlight underscore the value of such programs?

SARAH MARK: Yeah, I, you know, there’s so many directions to go with that question. I’m gonna try and keep myself funneled into one direction. But here’s what I was gonna say is we know that the ROI is there. We know that in a number of different ways. Workforce development initiatives for companies like ours are an integral part of our success. Salesforce will not be a huge successful enterprise company if there aren’t people out there who want to be Salesforce administrators, right? If the companies can’t hire the talent that they need to successfully implement their Salesforce instance. Now that said, there’s a million Salesforce admins out there. There’s a million consulting companies. You could get anyone in the world to do your Salesforce implementation for you. Why should you hire from BIT? Why should you make a concerted effort to bring people with disabilities into that type of role? And the answer is because you are getting more for your money. You’re getting more for your money when you’re hiring someone who is not only a Salesforce administrator, but an assistive technology expert. Someone who also has a mind to think about inclusion, accessibility, and how to set things up in a way where you’re not cutting off half of the talent pipeline from yourself because you’ve set it up in an inaccessible way. Right? So if you hire folks who are thinking that way from the get-go, you’re getting a whole design that’s built around inclusion. You’re opening up the possibilities of your own success. And I’m talking now about our customers and partners, right? That they are better situated for success when they’re bringing more people with disabilities into their hiring pool with a ripple effect, right? So they’re setting up their system for future success, for being able to hire more people with disabilities. They’re also bringing that value add into their company to have a person who can help them identify when something is not accessible or inclusive. Do you want your customers to only be people who don’t have disabilities? Do you want customers who are assistive technology users to feel excited about using your product or coming to your company? I can’t imagine a business that would say, no, thanks. We don’t need those millions of people. We want them to be interested or able to engage with us. Just doesn’t make any sense.

MASON AMERI: Yeah. No, that’s profound. And I appreciate the use of ripple effect in kind of unpacking or really kind of illustrating the point of what Mike is addressing and that the success of recruiting people with disabilities or even deferring to consumers that are people with disabilities, everyone’s the opportunity, right? Everyone’s the opportunity. So, Mike, for organizations that partner with BIT, what business advantages have they experienced by investing in workforce development for people with disabilities?

MIKE HESS: Again, so the Accenture has a disability equality index that’s out there. It comes out every single year. In the business case, it’s so amazingly solid. So again, the ROI, as Sarah indicated, so this is proven. This isn’t like, okay, well, we kind of think, no, Accenture has their name on it. This is legitimate data that’s out there. Bigger picture. The European Accessibility Act of 2025 is about to be enacted, obviously in Europe, obviously in 2025. All of the EU is going to adopt this in June of 2025. More progressive countries like Germany are adopting this January 1 of 2025. So literally there are punitive, punitive repercussions to organizations that are not serving, from a municipality and a private industry perspective, people with disabilities. And it goes so far as the employment of people with disabilities, right? Here in the United States, the Department of Justice in April of this year, it strengthened the Americans with Disabilities Act to include punitive repercussions. And so all 50 states now, by 2026 and 2027, must be digitally equitable, right? So the business case around digital equity, like, A, there’s the stick part of it, okay? But the benefit side of this, right, the carrot is, like, literally, there are trillions, trillions, trillions of dollars, right, when you start thinking that people with disabilities are one in six. Okay, the disposable income for this community is trillions of dollars. Globally. So this is not a kind of, like, oh, well, we need to, like, no, this is for businesses who are, I don’t know, focused on bottom line. This is a, this is a no-brainer. This is absolutely a no-brainer.

MASON AMERI: Well said, well said. On collaboration across sectors, and this is a question for both you, Sarah, and Mike, how important is cross-sector collaboration in furthering and advancing employment? Employment opportunities for people with disabilities. You know, what role does tech or do tech companies, governments, advocacy organizations play? Why don’t we start with you, Mike?

MIKE HESS: So cross-collaboration amongst sectors, and so tech, so when you think of tech, like, it’s not just the SaaS company, software as a service, right? It’s not just, you know, Microsoft and Google and AWS and Intuit and Salesforce and SAP. It’s way more than it’s way more than the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, brands, right? So tech is in all industries now, right? Whether it’s healthcare, whether it’s entertainment, you know, oil and gas, right? Energy sector, like, so tech is everywhere, right? And you start talking about the conversation around AI, like, what, what’s, what’s, what sector is AI not talking about? Not, not influencing at this point in time. So, so that’s why, like, so to me, the cross-knowing kind of like how does this all come together? The nexus of all of this well because tech is everywhere. Um, AI is everybody’s talking about AI and and like all of this is coming together. And then you start throwing in like there’s an actual talent tech shortage globally right so to me, the centerpiece of the Zen diagram event diagram is is all about like well again, you have more than a billion people on the planet with disabilities who are largely and I mean largely like here in the United States we’re more than two times more likely to be unemployed if you have a disability okay. And we’re the best in the world so when can only get worse globally. So, if there’s more than a billion of us on the planet, there’s a tech talent shortage. So to me, like this cross-sector of all these things happen is just it literally is like the no-brainer. This is like you know again, professionals with disabilities-greatest untapped human potential on the planet, attempting to serve right this global talent shortage that is not almost here, it’s here but yet and so even with all of this change we’re only getting worse globally. So if there’s more than a billion of that, we still like like it, there’s got to be this like aha tipping moment where again like, how do you engage these people. With disabilities, community there’s so much stigma, there’s so much perception, um, and I’m sorry, I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna go on a tangent here, and I, I believe that disability is nothing more than part of the human condition, right? If we’re so lucky all of us to live into our 90s or centurion ages, father time is undefeated here, right. So we know that our motor skills are going to be impaired, our cognitive is going to be impaired, our hearing will diminish, our eyesight will diminish, like that’s part of the human condition. But we’re terrified to talk about disability is from an employment perspective, right. that’s to me that so getting all of this right together like that’s how we that that’s how kind of connecting all the dots happens, yeah, no thank you for sharing that.

MASON AMERI: I’m going to frame this a little differently, Sarah, for you. Same question but just on the advice front: what sort of advice would you give to organizations seeking to partner with advocacy groups to build more effective workforce development programs?

SARAH MARK: I guess the uh the first piece of advice is to listen to people with disabilities right so if you don’t have uh if you don’t have people with disabilities already employed in your organization, something is Wrong if you do, you should be listening to them and um, you know. If actually what I’ll say is, if you think you don’t have any people with disabilities hired already in your organization, what you have is people hiding their disabilities, which means that you are not creating a psychologically safe environment for people to come forward and to be able to talk to them and to talk about their disabilities, and that it’s how you have people holding back when you could have people leading the charge. So um, really I guess just to start in the in the complete uh at the at the ground level, you have to build a psychologically safe Environment for people to talk about disabilities in order to break down some of those stigmas that we started talking about the beginning of this conversation in order to improve and increase education across the company, This builds a sense of pride across the organization, right? When you know you work at a company that values people with disabilities, that values an inclusive workplace, that values an inclusive customer base, that everyone at your company knows somebody with a disability, I’ll tell you that much. So there’s really no getting around it. So embracing it, moving forward, leaning in and not being scared to make mistakes because that’s how we learn.

MASON AMERI: Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on this. I have one final question before closing remarks. And this has to do with AI, Mike. You know, thank you so much for the segue. But how do you see the role of AI evolving in accessibility? And what promising developments, what sort of exciting new innovations do you think are creating more employment opportunities for people with disabilities?

MIKE HESS: Sure. So first of all, AI has been around for a hot minute. What we’re talking about now is like generative AI, right? You know, large learning models, small learning models, like it’s just so it’s a nuance, but it’s an important distinguishing factor. So, like, so tech as a whole, right? So kind of this way-back machine, because first of all, I like to think like, okay, so how does you know, technology as a whole help? Not only for the technology, but also for the technology as a whole. So, I think people with disabilities, society as a whole, right? And that’s kind of the intersection of it all with this doctor and the understanding that, okay, so we all enjoy, right? The automatic opening doors and airports and malls, that sort of thing. And that technology, okay, started because of the wheelchair community back in the 70s. Okay. Who doesn’t enjoy that, right? So fast forward to email. Email started because of the deaf community. Okay. Okay. Who does not, you know, take advantage of email? Hey, Siri, hey, Google, hey, Alexa, all technologies that were started by the blind community. And yet we all enjoy these technologies, right? So, so, so technology innovation comes from, right, you know, like, knowing that there’s a problem to be solved out there. So good technology, though, is that technology that serves humanity, right levels of humanity. And it was a great opportunity for me to, you know, see, um, Um, you know, try to do an education for ask the questions that I think are related to the visibilityيمugalities, um, I think that is a really essential matter, because I think this is key and a really important way to show what you mean. So, so that is takeaway information for me to, to, to be able to streaming. Uh, in the future and I know do many things. Yeah, thank you. Sometimes you’re not getting good, especially if you’re actuallyнейneonein脙 Well, absolutely. I mean, definitely. And I’m not used to the whole thing about, oh, you know, your vibration, you know? Apple’s done pretty well from a business perspective, and if you go to a disability-oriented conference, I promise you even though there’s a huge unemployment rate, like it looks like an Apple conference. So, so AI in today’s like generative AI, so uh products like, and how how do these products are like Microsoft’s co-pilot? Right, you can actually have Microsoft’s co-pilot take a Powerpoint presentation, right, call it a 30-page deck, 40-page deck, and it’s got graphs and charts and all this information. You can put that through Microsoft’s co-pilot and have it actually give a summary, so these pictures and these graphs and everything else that’s Out there, I can now get an auditory text, auditory summary of that that 30 page deck although is that just for somebody who’s blind. How many other individuals would love a summation of a 30-page deck, right? With all those facts and figures and everything else that are in these decks, right? So much information! So technology like good technology when it’s when it’s there to serve humanity, like it serves humanity and AI is absolutely just a vehicle uh in that chain of events.

MASON AMERI: Yeah, you’re you addressing universality is is an excellent way to end this discussion, um, because clearly what’s good for people with disabilities seems To be good for everyone, um once again, thank you to Sight Tech Global for bringing us together today. And I hope you have a great day. Heartfelt thank you to Sarah and Mike for sharing your inspiring work and insights on creating more inclusive opportunities in the workplace. Your efforts not only open new doors for individuals with disabilities but also remind us of the transformative power of technology and business. Thank you all for joining us, and we look forward to seeing how these innovations innovative conversations continue to evolve and make an impact.

SARAH MARK: Thank you so much.

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