Accessibility Awareness

All right, Maurice, would you like to just share what it is that you do as vice president of human resources at APH?

Thank you, Sarah.

So as vice president of human resources for the American Printing House for the Blind, it is my duty to be the people operations champion.

We have a great team of seven of us here in HR and it is, our team is actually broken down into recruitment, performance management, benefits administration, safety and wellness, And also including Abide into that.

So it is our duty here at APH to make sure that every employee feels supported and championed and encouraged in their everyday tasks.

And so this podcast is all about accessibility and we're talking about accessibility in the workplace.

Can you share some ways companies fail at making a workplace accessible?

You know, I think that ever since the 1990s with the Americans with Disabilities Act, I believe that businesses have been going after their physical location accessibility.

They're making their locations accessible to those who are their customers, their employees.

But I think now more so in the 21st century, and beyond, businesses are more forward thinking in making their digital spaces accessible.

And I think that a lot of that is where we're lacking.

And where a lot of businesses are failing because, you know, let's take, for instance, restaurant chains, right? Or DoorDash,

for instance.

Let's take DoorDash.

DoorDash is an app that you can utilize to order food or groceries or any other products and brought to your place of either business or home, residence, right? But is that app accessible? Has DoorDash jumped into that realm and said, can those who are blind or low vision follow this app and purchase what they need to purchase?

Now, is it? Because I've never used it.

Well, it's not.

Oh, no.

No, it's not.

Unless an employee or a customer has their screen readers or their audio devices connected to their phones when ordering DoorDash, DoorDash doesn't offer those components into their app and their virtual platform.

Now,

how is that...

Is that legal? Because I've heard over I've heard in the past like websites or I've heard like maybe a celebrity has a website and that website gets sued.

And I years ago, I remember hearing about a world famous celebrities.

And I was like, how do you sue over a website? And I guess because the web now now knowing what I know is because the website was not, I guess, accessible online.