Now Reading
What You Need to Know about Black People, Disability, and Accessibility

What You Need to Know about Black People, Disability, and Accessibility

Conference / Webinar

In this talk Angela Hooker discusses how we can empower and amplify the voices of Black and African Americans through accessibility in technology. During these extraordinary times, people with disabilities are often left out of important conversations or social movements due to a lack of accessibility in tech.

About one-fifth (20%) of the global population lives with disabilities and according to the 2017 American Community Survey, 13.6% of Black and African Americans have a disability. Angela explains how people in every discipline can implement accessibility in our everyday work—including PMs, content writers, designers, engineers, and more—can do so and further amplify the voices of Black people.

Watch the video below and let me know your thoughts in the comments. Also, please challenge yourself to send this video to at least three colleagues to raise awareness and keep the conversation going. Enjoy!

More Resources

Web Accessibility for Designers

 

Angela Hooker is a Senior Accessibility Program Manager at Microsoft, where she’s built a center of expertise for accessibility, user experience, and universal design. She’s brought her web management, development, design, accessibility, and editorial and content management expertise to the government and private sector for over 20 years. Angela also advocates for role-based accessibility and believes that teaching people how to incorporate principles of accessibility in their everyday work creates a sustainable program and produces the most accessible user experiences. Angela speaks on and writes about accessibility, disability, user experience, and plain language.

Juneteenth Conference is a free virtual tech conference made for and featuring Black people in Technology. The conference celebrates Black Excellence and promotes community for Black people who are severely underrepresented, overlooked, and underutilized in the tech industry.

Key Takeaways

1. 6.5 million Black and African Americans live with disabilities

Most are unable to join in the protests or experience and engage with messages due to lack of access

2. There are varying levels of disabilities

Within those levels, there are also groups of people that have different needs, and not every disability is visible

3. Accessibility isn’t only an engineering issue

It would be beneficial to everyone if all team members were responsible for thinking about accessibility

What's Your Reaction?
Excited
0
Happy
0
Love
0
Not Sure
0
Sad
0
Surprised
0
Upset
0

 

COPYRIGHT 2021 CASSANDRA BOLER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Scroll To Top