17-May-19 | News

3-6 Digital Success in less than 3 minutes by Joanna Wootten, Age, Disability and Inclusion Expert

Digital Success in less than 3 minutes

We celebrated Global Accessibility Awareness Day with the launch of 6 videos on accessibility in the workplace.

These videos feature how small changes can make a big difference.

Our vision is to have an inclusive society where disability and health conditions do not present a barrier in education or in the workplace through Assistive Technology, Ergonomics and creating an accessible environment.

This is the third video of our 6 series of accessibility in the workplace.

Let’s hear from Joanna Wootten, Age, Disability and Inclusion Expert. #DigitalSuccessin3mins

 

00:00
Digital success in less than three minutes. I’m Joanna Wootten. I’m a consultant and advise organisations around age and disability as a business issue particularly consumers and employees. I was born deaf and how this impacts on me that I can’t hear on the telephone and I also struggle to follow large meetings because it’s like a Wimbledon match I always miss what people are saying but also not everybody speaks clearly and often people have strong accents and I’m not familiar with how they’re talking. I use speech to text reporting, primarily that provide me with the equivalent of live subtitling for meetings and telephone call and telephone conferences. I do use mainstream technology a bit differently for instance, I use an iPhone and iPad the
 
00:52
reason I use them for example if I’m in the meeting I have Skype on this but then I have speech to text reporting they’re listening remotely they’re not often seem to be based in Ireland but they can be based in America whatever depends what time a meeting from time zone but then they will be listening via Skype on here but then what I do is I need subtitles on my iPad and it works really well I sometimes if I think this is a talking stick and it’s actually quite useful for disciplining meetings sometimes so that probably how people wouldn’t think of using that tablets and phone in that way. The other thing I do use I am a big fan of things like Skype, FaceTime because then I can see people so any meetings that enable people faces to be seen as well as heard, it’s fantastic for me. People ask about what superpowers, I
 
01:48
think often if you do find something to be more difficult than other people you tend to make up for it in other ways you may be more tenacious, more determined more creative because you can think of different ways of doing things and also because I’m used to thinking back but how can I do things differently I may come up with other ideas and solution. Also I can lipread, but I don’t bother to do you things like lipreading the Royal Wedding. Although technology is fantastic but it doesn’t solve every issues that you have. For instance, I can’t over hear gossip, I can’t over hear office politics. Quite often people are going to be working near you and talking about the latest changes in the teams, change in management or changing in focus and I don’t hear that say anything and I struggle to see how
 
02:42
technology can fully answer that. The advice I would give to organisations is to give it a shot because quite often you’re probably going to be able to see problem but you won’t be aware of the solution and you won’t be aware that thing could be done differently and you won’t realize in fact it’s easier than you think to employ somebody with a disability. This video was produced for Business Disability Forum in collaboration with BBC and Microlink. With thanks to: Anya Otto from Atos, Joanna wootten, Age, Disability and Inclusion Expert, Nicola James from Lexxic, Paul Bepey from BBC, Paul Smyth from Barclays, Ross Hovey from Lloyds Banking Group..