The Power of Accessibility for All

October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM), an opportunity, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, to “celebrate the value and talent workers with disabilities add to America’s workplaces and economy.” This year my appreciation for NDEAM’s purpose and commitment is deeper than it’s ever been.

Ensuring that every child thrives

A little over a year ago, one of my grandchildren was beginning her school year and was facing the challenge of navigating school as a dyslexic learner.* According to the Mayo Clinic, dyslexia is defined as “a learning disorder that involves difficulty reading due to problems identifying speech sounds and learning how they relate to letters and words (decoding). Also called a reading disability, dyslexia is a result of individual differences in areas of the brain that process language.” As I listened to her read, I heard her voice get smaller, more hesitant. It felt like the voice I knew, one of my favorite sounds in all the world, was getting lost, losing its confidence, and I wondered what other impact this could have on her vibrancy and her sense of connection . . . was she feeling left out?

As Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer at HMH, it’s my mission to do all I can to ensure that every child academically thrives, envisioning possibilities, belonging, and success. I want every child to know they belong and to be defined by their growth, creativity, and passions, and not by their struggles. Witnessing a child wanting to succeed and encountering obstacles fueled me more than ever to bring urgency to my mission to help all children learn and grow and know they belong. I know that I am not alone in feeling that sense of urgency and that we must work to remove the barriers to learning that students with disabilities face. According to The National School Boards Association, data collected in 2019 showed that “the average graduation rate for students with disabilities—those served by IDEA [Individuals with Disabilities Education Act]—was 67.1 percent . . . 17.5 percentage points lower than the 84.6 percent rate at which all students graduated.”

Finding powerful support

The stakes are too high to not do this work as fast as we possibly can. That urgency is always driving me, and so I felt a lot of frustration when, almost exactly a year ago, I fell—literally—into something that slowed me down: I took a bad fall and broke my right wrist in three places. The injury required surgery, and I was unable to work for a few weeks after the surgery. When I returned to work, I struggled to learn how to do my job while unable to use my dominant hand. I struggled to connect with my colleagues in the way I was used to doing. It felt like the urgency I bring to my work was getting impeded. It felt a lot like my voice was getting a bit lost. 

Although this injury was only temporary and not a disability like many people live with, I knew I needed support. I turned to HMH’s AccessAbilities Employee Resource Group (ERG) for help. By this point, in 2023, the culture of ERGs at HMH had been in place for several years, with the first ERG being established in 2018, and it had grown into a highly supportive network across the company, with nine ERGs going strong, including the AccessAbilities ERG, which had followed through spectacularly on its mission “to provide a safe space for employees living with a disability/neurodiversity to celebrate their strengths, discuss their experiences, and synthesize accessible solutions for the modern workplace.” Some of the most powerful moments I’ve experienced in my time as Chief Equity & Inclusion Officer have been related to the community, connections, and insights from the AccessAbilities ERG. On a profound level, this community has helped build and model a sense of belonging across the company. One of the leaders of the AccessAbilities ERG expressed this growing sense of belonging beautifully, saying, “I used to think that I had to become a different person at work. I had to be this model of what I thought professionalism was, and it didn’t include all of me. Now I know that I come to a job where I’m fully seen. I walk through the door as I am.”

Accessibility helps everyone

The AccessAbilities ERG helped me understand, with the new challenge I was facing with my broken wrist on my dominant hand, that I had options, that there were tools I could use to continue communicating. This was greatly reassuring. It took me a little while to get used to using text-to-speech software to help me communicate with my colleagues via new tools, but once I had some time and practice, I felt like I was once again able to slowly begin to bring my whole self to my work. It made me gain a deeper understanding of something another leader of the AccessAbilities ERG said: “There are a million ways of coming at something, and all of them are beautiful.” Even more than that, I felt like I had another new capability at my disposal going forward. This resonated with another insight from an AccessAbilities ERG leader, who pointed out, “accessibility helps everyone.”     

I love this understanding of accessibility, as it speaks to power of accessibility in the broadest terms, as a benefit to all. More granularly, accessibility has specific parameters that need to be understood to do the work to make sure all children can reach their full potential. Here is how the U.S. Department of Education describes what it means for something to be accessible: “A person with a disability is afforded the opportunity to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as a person without a disability in an equally effective and equally integrated manner, with substantially equivalent ease of use. The person with a disability must be able to obtain the information as fully, equally and independently as a person without a disability. Although this might not result in identical ease of use compared to that of persons without disabilities, it still must ensure equal opportunity to the educational benefits and opportunities afforded by the technology and equal treatment in the use of such technology.”

At HMH, with the AccessAbilities ERG fostering an understanding that accessibility helps everyone, we’re also committed to an all-in approach. Driving this effort to develop equitable and inclusive learning solutions is HMH’s Accessibility Advisory Board (AAB), a dynamic partnership between HMH’s Accessibility Advisory Council, established in 2021, and NWEA’s Accessibility Center of Excellence. The AAB integrates accessibility standards and best practices into our organizational processes, ensuring the most equitable and user-friendly experience for our products and services at HMH. I’m grateful to see this work happening across our business, as I see the impact this can have. As the year went on for my granddaughter, thanks to the support of her teachers and the use of effective classroom materials, I could witness her making progress. As she read, I could hear more of her whole voice and could feel her confidence growing. At the end of the year, her teacher confirmed this progress by showing that she’d advanced by more than the equivalent of a full year in reading level from where she was at the beginning of the year. Beyond the formal advancement of reading level, there was this simple fact that my granddaughter did not feel left out anymore.  

I am so proud of the work she’s done, and I’m so grateful that she got support from her teachers and from an accessible and supportive learning solution. I know, from those alarming graduation numbers I cited above, that her experience is not the rule. Many students still face inaccessible educational content that acts like a barrier or locked door, keeping them out. No child should ever experience such deflating barriers. Can you imagine attempting to enter a classroom, ready to learn, wanting to learn, only to be blocked by a locked door?

National Disability Employment Awareness Month

I hope you’ll join me in celebrating National Disability Employment Awareness Month and joining NDEAM’s “commitment to ensuring disabled workers have access to good jobs, every month of every year.” I now know, more deeply than ever, how powerful it is to be able to bring my whole self to my work, and I know what an impact this can have when everyone is able to do the same. As the NDEAM site puts it, “a disability-inclusive workforce is a strong work force,” backing up that statement by pointing out that “companies identified as leaders in disability inclusion had on average 1.6 times more revenue, 2.6 times more net income, and 2 times more economic profit than their counterparts.” I hope you’ll join me in deepening a commitment to working to ensure that spectacularly powerful access starts early, and that every child has an education free from barriers and obstacles. As I’ve learned, accessibility helps everyone, and everyone needs to help work for accessibility.  

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HMH is committed to providing an accessible workplace. Our belief is that a vision for inclusive education starts in the workplace. Learn more about our diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

* Using the term dyslexic (or dyslexic learner), rather than person with dyslexia, is our family’s choice; according to the National Center on Disability and Journalism’s Disability Language Style Guide, personal choice should determine language choices: “Ask people how they want to be described. Some prefer being called ‘dyslexic,’ others prefer people-first language, as in ‘a person with dyslexia.’”