This podcast is brought to you by BarrierBreak Solutions Private Limited and Score Foundation.
Hi, my name is George Abraham and welcome to Eyeway Conversations I have with me my colleague, Shilpi Kapoor. Hi Shilpi!
Hi, George, how you doing today?
Good good. Our guest today is Neil Milliken from the UK. He is an accessibility advocate. Hi Neil, welcome!
Hi, good to be with you.
Neil, I've been following you on Twitter for a few years now and I've seen you passionately pushing accessibility as an agenda. Tell us how you got interested and involved with accessibility.
Goodness. So I have been working in the field of assistive technology since 2001. I'm dyslexic, I have ADHD, it runs in the family. So I had been working in sort of e-commerce up until that time, and ended up working for a small company in Cambridge, UK that was specializing in technology for dyslexia and found it fascinating. I fell into my niche and worked there for about 10 years, ran their operations, ran a startup for them around mobile assistive tech, and then went to work for Siemens, which is a large company delivering assistive tech to one of their accounts, the BBC, which is the UK national broadcaster, so and then they got Siemens actually got bought by Atos about 10 years ago. And I've been there ever since and have gradually sort of expanded the role of accessibility to my remit and the team to run that for for the group as a whole. So I'm a user of assistive tech so I use speech recognition, sometimes text to speech, planning tools. So I have, as they say, skin in the game so it means something to me. And of course, it's important for people all around me and my customers, and I know how important it is. But also, accessibility is not just a sort of technical issue, it's a social justice issue. It's a fairness issue. It's a sustainability issue. And so all of these things sort of come together in the work that I do, and I'm trying to promote to really sort of, I'm trying to get it onto the top table agenda for businesses, not just for my own but for our customers and for others and that means that we have to collaborate, and that's why I'm on platforms like Twitter, I'm on LinkedIn and other places, and why I'm really passionate about coming out and speaking to people.
What is the kind of level of employment of people with disability in the corporate world that you have been exposed to?
The numbers are really unreliable. In one country, you may have set quotas. So for example, in France and Germany and Spain, you're required to employ a certain percentage of your workforces as people with disabilities. And then they also need to have a certain sort of classification of level of disability and all of this kind of stuff. In the UK, it's totally different in that we have non discrimination legislation and no quotas. So those kinds of things make it really difficult to get a true picture. I think that what we do and what we're encouraging others to do, and lots of leading multinationals are doing is actually working on self identity and a culture because there are an awful lot of people employed in our organization and others that that have disabilities that they don't declare it. And there are lots and lots of reasons why they don't declare it. So that's not me trying to escape from saying what the numbers are. I think you know, it varies between have 3 and 7 or 8%, which is half of what it should be if we think that 15 to 20% of the global population of people with disabilities, but then we have this huge undeclared population within businesses, and particularly with invisible disabilities and hidden disabilities. I used to joke that I was the most senior person in our company with a disability but I was certainly the most senior one that was open about it. And I think changing that culture of openness is really important because it sends a signal to the rest of the workforce. So we've changed that now, we have senior executive sponsors that are out there talking about their own lived experience. And I think that cultural change helps a lot. It helps us attract candidates, you still got the challenge that many of the recruitment systems deployed by most of the major firms are provided by companies that don't provide fully accessible systems. So there are lots of barriers for assistive technology users, there are lots of barriers for neurodivergent people like me, because forms are my pet noire, I just can't stand filling in forms, they are awful, they create anxiety and so those are barriers to even getting to the interview process. So I think that as companies start looking new ways of evaluating employee potential, employee performance, we will find that we're able to attract a much wider talent pool of disabled employee.
What are some of the strategies that you have adopted Neil, that have met with success, you know this is something that I think we would be able to also take up in India?
We've been training our HR people around neurodiversity, we've been running internships. So we've started a number of internships around neurodiversity, making sure that we can make those kinds of adjustments, we obviously are continuing our work to provide adjustments for our employees. And I think the other thing is, it's not just about recruitment, it's about retention. Because let's remember that most people acquire their disabilities and we're born with them, and that we acquire them within our working lifetime. So one of the areas where we've had our largest successes, but we still need to do more work on is actually in improving our workplace accommodations or adjustments and making them easier to get hold of and putting together centralized funding. So whilst there are legal requirements to do this, the processes and the signposting of it can always be improved. And by removing the requirement for the individual line manager to pay for their budget, that also removes quite a lot of resistance because in most companies, there's always a pressure on line managers for their budgets, they've got to meet targets, and so on. And if those targets are tight, 2000 pounds on assistive tech might be the difference between them meeting their target and not. And it's unfair on both the manager and the employee to be counting that in those targets. So removing that and putting that elsewhere and funding that centrally, not only makes it much easier because there's never get any objections when spending someone else's money and the employees get it a lot quicker. And I think that those are some of the things we're doing, we're moving to a model where we actually just make the assistive tech available in our company portal, and then monitor. And if people aren't using it, we remove it because if you need it, you're going to use it. Therefore you get it quickly and if you don't use it, you probably don't need it and if you do need it again, you can download it again. But this way, we're speeding up the process and at the same time, not incurring a bill for thousands of people installing it that never use it because sometimes people get curious.
In countries like Germany, Spain and France that you mentioned they are hiring people with disability more because it is mandatory and in the UK, I was not very clear why people kind of compelled to hire people with disability. But, you know the problem we have in India is that they look at it as more of a social nicety to have people with disability in the workforce. From what I hear, there is a reluctance to hire even in your part of the world, is that correct?
Those attitudes are changing. I think that at the top level corporate level now, there are a lot of large organizations where the leaders in these organizations have understood that actually diversity includes disability, that diversity of experience helps organizations be more resilient, have better ideas, avoid groupthink, avoid stagnation, and therefore, this is a core strategic topic. So even though we're not compelled in the UK to employ a certain number of disabilities, we're just compelled not to discriminate. There is a recognition that actually there's a benefit for the organization and so a lot of the work that we've been doing over the years is to actually talk about how disability is an innovation trigger. If we look at all of the tech that we're using today, my smart speaker that's built on the foundations of assistive tech, it's speech recognition is text to speech. The stuff on my mobile phone, this sort of enables me to capture business cards is optical character recognition but it's also helping me with my ADHD because it's putting stuff straight into my contacts so that I don't lose it and I don't get it wrong. So so all of this technology, what people with disabilities are either inventing, or the reason for the invention of it, or they're early adopters of this tech so it's understood now I think, within quite a lot of companies that by engaging with disability, you're getting an early view of how people are going to use tech. So I think that that people are beginning to understand the advantage. And then there are simply stats that show that actually, the sort of churn rate among disabled employees is lower, therefore you're paying less to recruit new people, that you get great loyalty into the organization and and we're no less productive. So I think we're slowly eroding those kind of old fashioned stigmas. But yes, there are still quotas in countries and entrenched attitudes that take time and sometimes generations to change. I think what we see with the younger generations is that this is taken as a given, you know there's an expectation that, of course, you include people, that everybody has value and so I think that I'm pretty hopeful for the future that this is an issue that is going to recede as people come into decision making positions that have always grown up with an attitude of inclusion.
I love how you said Neil that you know it's about the innovation that's coming together, you know because of this community. And, you know I love that you said about the centralized budgets and centralized tools because I think you're right in saying I think George was alluding to this, when companies are resistant to hire, it's about the cost associated with it, right. And it's about how am I going to pay for this assistive technology. You've given a fabulous answer out there for companies to take a much more macro view, rather than very micro view of hiring people with disabilities. And I think, at least from an India perspective, I think that is a conversation that you know, should be and Atos has Syntel in India, right?
35,000 employees in India, we're recruiting another 15,000 this year and we intend to recruit people with disabilities amongst those recruits. So I mean, there's an explicit desire for us to do that. But I also think that there's this argument that it cost too much. It costs us 14 times as much as the average cost of the adjustment or the accommodation in recruitment phase alone to replace an employee.
Perfectly said and a number that nobody thinks about so perfectly said, right and, George, we have to change that conversation for corporate India.
Yeah.
Like that's the conversation that we have to shift towards, right when you listen to Neil and you know, over the years every time I've spoken to him, so these nuggets that he gives me, which makes me go back and think about how this has to happen. And I think these are the things that we need to take back to corporate India official.
We're in the middle of what they call the Great Resignation right now, everybody's got fed up of staring at the screen for years on end and not going anywhere, and then thinking about what they wanted to do in their life. So they're quitting and finding a job where they stare at the same screen but with different people. And that has a cost to companies because they're having to recruit. So this is why I said that retention is so important, because being able to retain even an extra 5% of your employees is going to have a significant impact on your bottom line. So all of these things really add up to far more than we're paying in terms of making the adjustments or the accommodations. So once that's understood and once you've trained your CFO to understand that they're, you know, they need to look at two lines on the budget, so that the small amount of spending on the one line is actually having a positive impact on the spending on a different line of the budget. And once they've made that link, then I think that they're quite happy to sign it off and to buy into it. So I do think that having a sort of an understanding of business and operations is really important for accessibility advocate.
You know, there are a lot of HR people in India who say we want to hire but we don't get qualified people with disability. Is that something that you hear in the UK as well?
It is a challenge, right, because the pipeline of talent starts much earlier.
Right.
So this is an area where we need to be looking at the education system as well, we need to make sure that people with disabilities get access to education. So there are times where it is difficult to find qualified candidates. So then we need to be finding ways to upskill people, right so there is a need to and to understand that businesses require skills, you can't just take on people as charity cases, because that perpetuates the charity model. And we don't want handouts, we want people to acquire skills, be self supporting to contribute to society, to be taxpayers, to be, you know, all of these things, right.
Right.
An ecosystem of inclusion and so, whilst I work in business, I'm very much supportive of sort of digital skills initiatives that can help train people so that we can create this pipeline of credible, qualified candidates.
Which leads us to let's hear about the apprenticeship program that you have worked on along with a lot of other companies. I think that would be a good lead into that.
Yeah. Okay so we were struggling to find accessibility people. I think this is a struggle that everyone has. And I know you do good work on training too but in the UK, for sure we were struggling to recruit people. And there is a structured apprenticeship program in the UK which for lots of types of jobs, where large companies pay in a tax, and that levy then goes to fund the education. So we a few years back started taking on apprentices and we had to sort of tack on accessibility to software development apprenticeships but those apprentices have been great. It's been a really very positive experience for us. And as part of that, we thought well, actually we need to go one step further. And so there was a sort of duality of things that I wanted to do. One was accessibility wasn't really recognized as a profession anywhere. We had the IALLP which we're very supportive of and heavily engaged with as well. But in the UK, it wasn't really recognized by government. So by creating an apprenticeship standard, which has to be signed off by the UK Department for Education, you have to create an occupational profile and that gets recognized. So essentially, whilst we were both creating a framework to train people up, we were also putting into the government's strategic planning processes, the recognition that accessibility is an occupation, and therefore that it's now something that they have to strategically plan for. Because now they need to be thinking about well, how do we build a pipeline of skills because there's an occupation here that that we've recognized, that then becomes validated and starts percolating into their planning. So that was something that was in the background of my head when we're thinking about it. And we took about three years to get this done as a collaborative group of people, we had support from Barclays, Shell RNIB, AbilityNet, BBC, Microlink, and some really small companies like Hex design, as well. And it's really important as part of the apprenticeship creation, that it shouldn't just be for large companies so it's a mixture of on the job, and sort of course based learning. And as a result of that, people get taught key accessibility skills, they get taught about how to do customer service, how to understand disability, the foundations are around working and all the different standards and regulations and how to make a cogent argument, and how to deal with difficult project managers and all this kind of stuff. So at the end of it, they'll come out and they'll be far better at accessibility than me. And that's the intent because most of the people that are in the accessibility profession that are of my age or older, and there are a lot of us that are in our 40s and 50s. This has come as a second career, and we've acquired stuff as we've gone along and we've the whole accessibility professional has pretty much been bootstrapped. And now to have frameworks for training and so on and it's important for that next generation. I'm really really excited about apprenticeships because we think the likelihood is that when we start with the first official cohort next year, they'll probably be about 100, maybe more which if you think about it is a significant addition to the profession. If we do this every year, then it's going to really spread the skills and make for a wider talent pool and new skill sets also transferable between other sort of technology professions.
I was also wondering since you have been working in the accessibility space for so long, have you, you know a lot of people talk about universal design and you know, companies that work and who are in the economy do they actually, when they provide products and services, is there a thought that the products and services need to also cater to people with disabilities? I know that Apple and Microsoft and the companies that that have products which are which are inclusive, and universal in nature, but generally as a culture in, say Europe, have you seen any drift towards universal design?
So I have, I mean I think that there is a greater awareness that we need to be designing inclusive products, I think they sometimes the challenge with semantics is that universal means that every single product must work for everyone. And we know that actually, that can be a challenge, right. Because disability in itself is diverse. So you know, taking an inclusive design approach is really important, like teaching that is super important. If I'm honest, there's an awful lot of technology that is a not inclusively designed but just really badly designed anyway. So from a cognitive accessibility and usability point of view, they've just forgotten to do design because they've done tech. So I think that the there is still a good deal of work to be done on the maturity of design thinking as a whole and that we move inclusivity into design thinking and get it into the courses and everything else. So some of the stuff that I've been passionate about when I've been doing some work with the Institute of coding, which is a UK initiative around technical and technology skills is to try and start getting accessibility elements embedded into all of these technical courses, because it should be something that is not an elective, it needs to be something that's sort of foundational in our technology and our design education that then becomes the norm. You think about this at the beginning, much like we do with security. And I think that if we look at the relative maturity of our sort of career groups, if you like our professions, security has followed a similar path. Accessibility is lagging behind on that but we've started later maybe. And I think that the security guy used to be the person that came in at the end of the project and said, no you can't go live. And all of these things are broken and by the way, it's going to cost you x and we've been a bit like that in the accessibility industry. We've been at that the right of the project, you know at the end point where we're checking for it too late in the process, and we need to shift left in the process to get much earlier, get to the designers, get to the people that are even before that, we need to be getting into the heads of the people that are requesting our products and services. So forgive me if I sound like I'm boiling the ocean, but we essentially have a PR job to do and a communications job. So a lot of what I focus on doing is trying to work on getting that understanding out there as to the benefit to society, the benefit to business and thinking about including this right from the very beginning, rather than it being a compliance exercise. Of course, we do compliance of course we do auditing, of course we do all of these checking, and everything else, those things still need to happen. But I want to leave that to the people that have been taught to do that really well like our apprentices and like the people at BarrierBreak and then work with great communicators like Caroline Casey and others that are really making that case for thinking about it right from the beginning and making it embedded into just the way we do things.
As they say, very everything comes back to the beginning, which is think diversity, operate diversity, and execute diversity. And so I think Neil you've thrown light on several very interesting areas in terms of disability inclusion and accessibility and it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much Shilpi and Neil.
Thank you Neil.
And wish you all the best.
You're very welcome. Thank you.
This podcast was brought to you by BarrierBreak Solutions Private Limited and Score Foundation.
