 My name is Sean Marahue and I work at Microsoft. I'm an escalation engineer on what's called the disability answer desk, which is a free technical support service for customers with disabilities. I'm Jean Hodson. I work for Provell. We're a nonprofit organization that advocates for folks with disabilities. We help them get into the mainstream job market, into mainstream jobs, working with Americans in the fields of all different types of work. I'm Sam SEPA. I'm an HR professional and I've worked for a variety of tech companies over the last 10 years of my career and now I'm focusing on recruitment for software engineers. I'm Suzanne Sears and I work for the University of Illinois specifically with the Disability Resources and Educational Services Office. I'm Mike Forehand. I work in the recruiting space with a focus on creating diversity outreach primarily toward the disabled community. My name is Tony Bayless. I work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that's in Livermore, California. It's one of 17 Department of Energy labs. Our focus is on national security. Recruiting and retaining employees with disabilities. People with disabilities are in general fairly underrepresented in a lot of fields. Computing is definitely one of the top driver top fields there. I think it's really critical that students feel encouraged and empowered to pursue fields in computing because I think they can pave the way to make everyone else's experience with technology better. How are we supposed to solve societal problems if we're not representing society as a whole and in that regard you know you need to be inclusive with the individuals that you're serving and that's the entire population. If you have two billion people with disabilities how can you ignore that? How can you ignore not inviting them into the discussion? Candidates with disabilities have a unique thought process to bring to a company. Our country is diverse so the marketplace needs to attract a lot of diverse people who will use products that we were selling or the services we're providing. If a country is diverse your team needs to be diverse as well to parallel what our country's demographics are. As team members they're just as passionate about making contribution and being a part of a broader team as everyone else is. The difference being is that they look at the world and they have different problem-solving and coping skills that lead them to different solutions. I don't think it's the case that someone with a disability knows everything about everyone else's disability but I think they bring a certain empathy to a company so they'll understand that people have different experiences and having interns and employees with disabilities I think they can bring that perspective. I think having people with disabilities in your culture actually helps people to better understand about our culture difference about our learning differences about how you can have different perspectives. More sensitivity is needed when you're talking about interviewing these types of candidates. You need to think about the support that they are going to need in the interview beforehand and have more of a streamlined process that makes the candidates feel welcomed right at the start of the interview so that they feel welcomed into the team. They know what's going to have to be happening in the process of the interview. It empowers them and really allows for that magic to happen in the interview process. We work currently as a partner with Microsoft on their artistic hiring program. We help them recruit. We help them obtain lots of individuals that they might include in their hiring pool. We coach the folks that are going to be interviewing them. We coach the interviewees in helping through some of the difficult areas like phone screenings, making a little bit of a softer job interview process so that you can get to the core of the skills of the individual and see if they're a great fit for your employment. One study that really inspired me that I read about was asking customers in the marketplace if they learned about a company that hired people with disabilities. What they found out was that customers that found this out about companies would be more willing to buy their products and services and we learned it's because customers have more respect for a business that does that. Not only because it's the right thing to do but because they are really taking charge of that responsibility. They're committed to diversity and hiring a diverse workforce including people with disabilities. Any time that inclusion is part of a goal everyone benefits and when there's technology that is inclusive such as videos that are captioned or websites where it's more accessible to someone with any type of difficulty then there's a more expansive audience. There's more expansive ability for profiting. I think that investment in everybody's future has to do with building and designing things that are accessible from the very beginning. It's investment for all of our futures not just the person, individuals with disabilities and none of us know what's going to happen to us individually. In a matter of seconds your whole life can change and you yourself may join the disability community and need these accommodations. So it's not just about you know hiring and recruiting people but it's an investment for all of us. I think we have a challenge but to include people with disabilities that we have to start to work on shedding biases in general and these implicit and unconscious biases across the board and that's even with people with disabilities. I think we'll have a long road unfortunately but I think it's it's a it's a road that we can work together. I think we need organizations and companies to collaboratively work on this effort. So in an environment where industry is based on cross-cultural collaboration and everything's kind of very team-oriented having a completely different point of view is invaluable. When we're bringing the perspectives and at least considering the different perspectives that other people have I think we can make our products way more inclusive, make our culture, make our workplace just way more inclusive in a better place to be. Truly attitudinal access is the most important part of being inclusive. It's not physical access it's attitudinal access so we have to impact culture and I know that takes a while and that that can be challenging but I think starting out small and having one good success is an incredible start and then you build momentum from there. Engage with access computing to develop strategies for recruiting, onboarding and retaining employees with disabilities. For more information on access computing visit uw.edu slash access computing. Access computing is a collaboration of Duet, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Information School at the University of Washington. This video and other aspects of the Access Computing Project are funded by the National Science Foundation as part of the Broadening Participation in Computing Program of the Directorate for Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering CISE grant number CNS-153-9179. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this video are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Copyright 2016 University of Washington. Permission is granted to copy these materials for educational non-commercial purposes provided the source is acknowledged.