20-May-19 | News

4-6 Digital Success in less than 3 minutes by Anya Otto from Atos

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

Let’s hear from Anya Otto from Atos.

00:00
Digital success in less than three minutes. I am Anya Otto, I work for Atos which is a major IT consultancy and I work in as a workforce manager in the in-house creative agency and after hours I’m also the head of comms for our in-house disability network for our employees. I am quite high on the high-functioning autism spectrum as well as dyslexic. This affects me in a way that because I have been diagnosed so late unlike other people with autism I have not got the train coping mechanism in place so I struggle making eye contact and which can make face-to-face interactions a little bit daunting for me I guess. So, the best thing for my disability or impairment is not necessarily physical you know adjustments that you need to take put in place but things like that I’m allowed to work from home and which puts a lot takes a lot of pressure off of me. Allows me to instead of talking on the phone
 
01:14
which makes me a bit anxious and I can type and I can think about what I want to say and it gives you a spellchecker as well so learning new processes or establishing processes is really easy which makes things like my job quite easy for me. I would say the biggest problem that I have is that like the majority of disabilities which is 80% are invisible you don’t see that I have a disability. To a lot of people I’m a nuisance, you know I’m loud, I’m disruptive to some people I’m not everybody’s cup of tea and that you know people that may be quieter in nature feel potentially like I walk over them and you do for your own sanity and for other people’s understanding you do have to declare that you are actually not deliberately causing mischief shenanigans at work but that this is part of disability that you that you struggle
 
02:18
to control under certain circumstances and that you know that you ask for a little patience and cooperation in in these areas. I use mainstream technologies differently in the sense that I have certain preferences. So as video conference calls and telephone conversations get me a little bit anxious and panicky I tend to prefer typing and using either link or circuit as an in-house messaging tool to converse with my colleagues who are based all over the world and I also tend to you know have preferences not to have too much noise around me so some people have music in the background and it helps their productivity whereas for me it does the exact opposite. I start singing along and you know get more distracted by it. 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.