20-May-19 | News

5-6 Digital Success in less than 3 minutes by Nicola James from Lexxic

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 fifth video of our 6 series of accessibility in the workplace.

Let’s hear from Nicola James from Lexxic.

00:00
Digital success in less than three minutes. My name is Nicola James and I’m a chartered occupational psychologist. I was diagnosed with dyslexia in my third year of my degree and as a result having a support tuition it made such a big difference to my life so actually what I do is to try and help people who have dyslexia so I’m a chartered psychologist and the CEO of Lexxic. I don’t know whether I call dyslexia an impairment. I probably would call it a difference like I think dyslexia enables me to run a company. I have 15 employees and we’re growing it makes me very sort of
 
00:35
bigger picture thinking. I think the thing I find harder is the thing is things like reading complex information, getting my thoughts down on page. So when I was at university I used three assistive technologies. I used voice recognition which is basically I speak and it types for me like Dragon NaturallySpeaking I used mind mapping software to help get my thoughts down on paper and structuring my essays in the brainstorming way and I use text speech I used Read&Write Gold which basically reads the text out loud to highlights the words as you read. In the workplace I just use text-to-speech which basically is getting the Read&Write gold which reads
 
01:14
the text aloud to me it makes such a big difference and also when proofreading my work, oh my god it’s a saviour. it shows me if I’ve actually written oh I think I’ve written and helps me spot spelling errors as well. I think one of the only ways I use it differently is I love having huge monitors and particularly having two what I find is that if I have to keep referring between documents I forget what I’ve looked at so I have to relook at the document and that’s because of my short-term memory which is related to my dyslexia whereas if I can compare and contrast two documents together or have my emails here I have the document I’m working on next to me it makes such a big difference. Enables me to work faster and just be more proactive and as the information is
 
01:57
larger I can read documents more easily I can see this makes more easily. I think one of my superpowers is the gift of dyslexia because by being given that did struggle but through those challenges, I just wanted to make people’s lives easier so I set up Lexxic to help other people who’d been through what I’ve been through and it is challenging when you have dyslexia and you don’t have the right tools so I think the superpower is to care about other people and give them skills that I was given In my third year of my degree and enable them in the workplace to succeed. So, if you were thinking of hiring someone with dyslexia I would look beyond the label, I find that dyslexia has many many strengths just important to ensure that the
 
02:36
role person is going for aligns with their strengths. I have a team with people who have dyslexia and don’t have dyslexia and I find that people with dyslexia have many strengths like coaching, working on one-to-one supporting people, giving presentations and then other people that are really good at the detail might not be so good at the bigger picture and together the team works really well so I think it’s important to recognize and look beyond the label look at what people are good at and align those strengths with the role and if you have dyslexia, make sure you don’t give yourself such a hard time and look at what you’re good at and focus on what you’re good at because you’ll find lots of doors open if you do that. 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.