Closing the Disability Gap: Salesforce Shares Progress on Accessibility Efforts, New Advocacy Commitment

Quick Take:

People with disabilities represent more than one in four of the 7.7 billion people who live around the world. Salesforce is working to ensure inclusion for people with disabilities with participation in “The Valuable 500.”

Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), which focuses on digital access and inclusion for people in every country. On this important day — now in its tenth year — I am proud to share Salesforce’s ongoing commitment to disability inclusion, a fundamental part of our belief that business is a platform for change.

Expanding our work with The Valuable 500

As part of our commitment, we announced our role as one of The Valuable 500’s 13 Iconic Leaders, helping to transform businesses with a goal of closing the disability unemployment gap. As part of this designation, we publicly committed to facilitating a global jobs portal — developed by people with disabilities — to ensure greater access to opportunities and more diverse workforces.

The facts are simple: persons with disabilities bring a wealth of talent and diversity of lived experience to the table, of immense value to business decisions and issues, from product development and customer engagement to areas of investment.
The Valuable 500

The Valuable 500 is a global call to action for 500 of the world’s most influential businesses to include disability on their agenda and end bias toward disability in business. Today, The Valuable 500 is the largest community of global corporations committed to this goal, with 500 companies on board, and more expected to join.

We joined the group in 2019 to create inclusive workplaces where everyone feels valued, respected and comfortable bringing their true self to work. Our participation as an Iconic Leader is only the beginning. There is much work to be done, and we are excited to move forward on this next phase of our journey.

Reflecting on our efforts in a turbulent year

In addition to our work with The Valuable 500, we are also making strides in accessibility within our business.

In 2020, we doubled down on our efforts, introducing new programs and policies to make our workplace more inclusive with a focus on pandemic necessities like accessible virtual events. And together with our partners and our incredible employee resource group, Abilityforce, we are able to make a more meaningful impact.

We started an important partnership with Disability:IN to create the “Digital Accessibility and Other Best Practices for Remote Working” guide to ensure virtual meetings, events, and the resulting materials are accessible to everyone.

We connected our U.S.-based recruiting team with Inclusively, the professional network transforming the way candidates with disabilities, mental health conditions, and chronic illness connect to inclusive employers.

Given the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on employment opportunities for persons with disabilities, we launched a partnership with the Blind Institute of Technology (BIT) to support their Salesforce Administration Certification Prep Course by providing certification and recertification vouchers along with a grant to fund the salaries for on the job training.

We expanded our large-scale partnerships globally by onboarding Business Disability Forum and the International Labour Organization, part of the UN, both of which link businesses, governments, and employees to create a disability-smart world of employment.

Global Accessibility Awareness Day marks the start of a new strategic career development partnership with Atos and the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) to help advance the number of Accessibility professionals in the talent pool. To kick off this partnership, Salesforce will grant IAAP certifications to the Atos Accessibility Academy program, which focuses on developing advanced skills in Accessibility with online, classroom, and on-the-job training. This is the beginning of a much larger plan, stay tuned!

I am delighted to be able to partner with Salesforce and the IAAP to grow accessibility skills. #GAAD is a day of knowledge sharing and so what could be more appropriate than to launch a partnership to teach and share much needed accessibility skills.
Neil Milliken Global Head of Digital Inclusion – Group CSR at Atos

Hired our first Vice President of Product Accessibility and Inclusive Design, Elise Roy. We center our approach with the understanding that when we design our culture and products for different abilities, we’re not only making sure we’re including people with disabilities, but making products much more adaptable to different circumstances into which we live and work.

We’re working with our customers to advance their efforts around accessibility. Last October we kicked off Disability Employment Awareness Month by announcing the creation of our new Twitter handle and branding and launched our first Accessibility Support Team that focuses on creating incredible support experiences for customers seeking to build accessible environments on the Salesforce platform.

Continuing to drive success

This year’s rapid digital transformation has underscored the power of flexibility, and proven that great work is possible when all people are empowered to live and work where, when and how they can make the most impact. These insights have paved the way for Salesforce’s Success from Anywhere strategy, and together we are cultivating a culture and building flexible and accommodating solutions that allow any member of the workforce to succeed from wherever they are.

At Salesforce, we believe that creating a workplace that works better for everyone is a critical step in delivering our higher purpose to drive Equality for All. All over the world, people with disabilities have been impacted disproportionately in terms of unemployment compared to their non-disabled counterparts. In the US alone, 1 million people with disabilities have lost their job since the beginning of the pandemic. To close this gap, we must build inclusive workplaces and programs that bring in talent and provide equal access to the tools to help advance those careers.

As we embark on our Iconic Leadership efforts, we will continue to share our work on our Iconic Leadership efforts in hopes that others will follow and help to close the disability unemployment gap together.

Accessibility resources

Find an answer in help: For general questions about accessibility features that affect end users, start by searching for an answer in our help documentation.
Report an issue: If you’ve found an accessibility issue you’d like to report or simply need additional user support, follow the appropriate steps to create a support case.
Check on accessibility status: The results of Salesforce product accessibility audits are available on our product accessibility status page.
Learn on Trailhead: Take a trail on Trailhead to learn why it’s important to make technology accessible to everyone and the best practices for authoring accessible content.
Join the conversation on Twitter: Find us, @SalesforceA11y, to get the latest on product accessibility news, community happenings, and other inclusion-related topics.
Trailblazer Success Community: Ask questions, discuss workarounds, and collaborate with other users of Assistive Technology. This is a group to discuss all things disability related. Visit the Community.