Insight #4 — Accessibility & Disability Inclusion

Strengthening our focus on people with disabilities helped us better recruit, hire, and build for this community.

Eve & KR
6:27

Spotlight

Hear our Senior Director of Accessibility and Disability Inclusion, Eve Andersson, and Head of Brand Accessibility, KR Liu, discuss our focus on making our workplace and world more equitable and accessible for the disability community.

What's working

For every interview we offer, our Candidate Accommodations team works to make sure all candidates have the accommodations they need during interviews, including extended time, a sign language interpreter, CART captioning, and more.

Woman, Holly Slonaker, with ponytail leaning head on hand with Google sign language shirt.

Spotlight

“Being deaf, the job search process can present some unique barriers. From my first interaction with Tricia, I knew this experience was going to be different. She went above and beyond to make sure I had everything I needed to be as successful as a hearing candidate.”

— Holly Slonaker


Further reading

Read about Holly’s path to Google, as a program manager and member of the Disability Alliance employee resource group at Google, and her experience working with recruiter Tricia Martines throughout the interview process.

Measuring progress

We received a 100 score on the Disability Equality Index for the second year in a row for our efforts at disability inclusion in our workplace.

Google’s Disability Alliance was named the 2020 Employee Resource Group of the Year by Disability:IN.

In the workplace

Changes in our recruiting and hiring practices can help us source and hire more people with disabilities.

Launched a dedicated Google Careers resource page specifically tailored to what a job seeker with a disability might find helpful.

Partnering with the Stanford Neurodiversity Project to provide prospective Google candidates who identify as autistic with coaching, career resources, and onboarding assistance.

Continuing our partnership with Lime Connect to help prepare and connect university students and professionals with disabilities to dynamic careers, scholarships, and internships.

Launched the first Disability Fundamentals for Managers training to increase understanding of disability and the need for inclusion. We have since open sourced the training to share this resource with the industry.

Dedicating teams to work on improving our internal workplace tools and ensuring they are designed with the highest accessibility standards from beginning to end. For example, we built a comprehensive training program for UX designers around how to build accessibility into internal tools from the start and how to become champions for accessibility throughout the design process.

In the world

We’re building technology with and for people with disabilities, and making our products more accessible around the world.

TalkBack braille keyboard helps people who are blind or low vision have the ability to type quickly without additional hardware.

Action Blocks is designed for people with speech and cognitive disabilities to make common tasks easier with customizable buttons on your Android home screen.

Sound Notifications on Android delivers important visual and haptic push notifications for those unable to hear them.

The Accessible Places feature in Google Maps allows people to easily see whether a destination is wheelchair accessible.

Chromebook and Google Workspace for Education are more accessible for learners who are deaf, hard of hearing, or need extra support to focus, with features like more colors for cursors on Chromebooks, more support for braille in Google Docs, and live captions in Google Slides and in Google Meet, as well as voice commands to carry out actions in Google Docs.

Our Chrome team partners with Igalia, an external engineering group, to build Linux screen reader support for Chrome browser, empowering developers who are blind to get the most out of Chrome on Linux.

In the world

Champions Place, through Champions Community Foundation, is the first-of-its-kind, shared living residence for young adults with physical disabilities.

Person in black collared shirt sitting on bed smiling in front of a window.

Spotlight

“These products have been most helpful in staying in touch with my family — we chat on my Nest Hub Max or use Google Meet on my Pixelbook. And I keep up with all of my shows on YouTube TV, which is easy to use with Chromecast.”

— Ryan Carroll, a resident of Champions Place


Further reading

Read about how Champions Place incorporates the latest in Google assistive technology for its residents.

In the world

In the summer of 2020, two organizations — Diversify Photo and Black Disabled Creatives — used Google Sheets and Google Forms to build public databases of underrepresented artists and innovators, to help amplify and ensure these voices are heard in the creative world.

Jillian Mercado, founder of Black Disabled Creatives, seated in wheelchair with foliage in background.

Spotlight

“One of the reasons why I did Black Disabled Creatives was so that the connections that I do have, or the connections that I have gained, so they can see that there’s a lot more, there’s a lot more of me out there. There’s a whole, whole massive community that has been underrepresented, invisible, not because we wanted to be invisible, because they chose for us to be invisible and not give us opportunity because of fear.”

— Jillian Mercado, founder of Black Disabled Creatives


Further reading

Read about how these databases were built by word of mouth using Google tools.

Person with long blond hair and black shirt and turquoise necklace smiling.

“Our goal is to not only make Google a better place, but to raise the water for all boats so that the world can be a more inclusive place for people with disabilities.”

Eve Andersson is the Senior Director of Accessibility and Disability Inclusion at Google.

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