And Accessibility for All
Michael Lenz, Human Resources, Cisco wants you to consider this: With some 20 percent of the population living with some sort of disability, there's a good chance that one of your colleagues is disabled and you don't realize it.
"Most people are aware of physical disabilities among their friends or colleagues," he says, "but there are many disabilities that go completely unrecognized." Hearing impairment is the most underreported disability for example. Another unrecognized disability might be a visual impairment because it doesn't mean someone is completely blind. Color blindness is the inability to perceive differences between some or all colors that other people can distinguish.
In 1998, the Americans with Disabilities Act was amended to provide for Web accessibility. Section 508 requires, in part, that electronic and information technology that is developed or purchased by the U.S. federal government be accessible by people with disabilities.
In 2000, Lenz was part of an external consulting team tasked with helping Cisco ensure its customer-facing Websites were 508-compliant. "Part of my job was educating people at Cisco about these issues," he recalls. "After a while, we realized that it was just as important that the company's internal Website, the CEC [Cisco Employee Connection], also be accessible.
"Cisco executives realized that if Cisco.com doesn't meet the needs of people with disabilities, the company might lose a contract," he continues. "In considering this, they became aware that if the internal site doesn't meet the needs of staff with disabilities, we could lose a valuable employee, or fail to attract a valuable employee."
At the end of his contract, Lenz was asked to join Cisco as the interface lead for CEC, and he became responsible for establishing accessible design standards.
"I'm a 'user-experience' guy, not a developer or an engineer. My job is to understand and support the end user," he says. In addition, Lenz has been a contributor to the W3C Accessibility Initiative—a volunteer international project to create accessibility standards for HTML and other Web design tools—for many years. It's this kind of experience and dedication that has enabled him to help make the necessary changes on the Cisco.com Website.
"Today we have 150,000 pages in the new [accessible] template, and the fact that we've been able to accomplish that in 18 months is pretty huge."
But more important, he says, is the acceptance of the need for accessibility across the company. "Using the CEC is a requirement of all Cisco employees in order to do their jobs," he says. "We've been able to sell enough people on how important accessibility is that the ideas are now spreading organically, which is really nice."
