“Everyone at some point in their lives, will be impacted by disability.”

That was a sentiment that was communicated to me several times over the course of the last few weeks as I’ve interviewed various people on the topic of accessibility. And each time I heard it – I found myself thinking about that statement – a lot, I guess perhaps to evaluate whether or not I believed it.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says that sixteen percent of the global population, or one in six people, experience a significant disability. While that’s a significant number of people impacted, I still didn’t quite make the connection of how it quite touched everyone.

KR Liu, Google’s head of brand accessibility went into a little more detail about it during our chat, and when she explained it this way, I started to get it. She said “everyone is going to experience disability at some point in their lifetime. Whether it’s temporary, whether it’s permanent, whether it’s a family member, whether it’s a friend. We are all going to be connected to disability at some point.”

And then as I went and read the definition of disability as defined by the ADA – or Americans with Disabilities Act – I realized disability has already impacted me personally. 

The ADA defines disability as someone who has “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a person who has a history or record of such an impairment, or a person who is perceived by others as having such an impairment.”

Common categories of disability include – 

• Blind or low vision
• Chronic health condition (such as diabetes)
• Deaf or hard of hearing
• Learning (such as dyslexia)
• Neurodiversity (such as the autism spectrum)
• Physical
• Psychiatric (such as depression)
• Speech

I experienced short-term disability in the weeks after I was recovering from giving birth to Luna. And most recently, I experienced disability last year when I had an Ulcerative Colitis – autoimmune flare up that hung on for months, which resulted in me having to cancel just about all of my work activities for a bit – and severely limited how often I left my house.

Disability impacts more of us than we think. And because of that – focusing on accessibility in your marketing will enable your brand to not only serve more people than you think – but allow you to make a positive impact on their lives.

Accessibility is a big topic – and it can feel a bit overwhelming at times. So today, I’m going to give you practical ways to think about how to lean into accessibility in with your brand by walking you through how Google approaches accessibility. 

They’ve been at this for a long time, and have a learned a lot over the years that can help all of us build accessible brands more quickly. We’ll dive into their approach and the lessons you can take from it right after this short break.

OK – so a few weeks ago I sat down with KR Liu, as I mentioned earlier, who is Google’s head of brand accessibility. We talked a lot about their approach to serving the disability community, and I want to synthesize what I learned from KR as well as from more of my own research, into a bit of an action plan for you into a smart and effective way to build an accessible brand.

Values

Google leans so hard into accessibility for a simple reason: It’s a part of their values. Their stated mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Accessibility is baked right into their entire reason for being.

Now – to ensure we’re all on the same page here – I want to give you the definition of “accessible.”

According to dictionary.com – accessible means:

1. Easy to approach, reach, enter, speak with, or use
2. Able to be used, entered, reached
3. Suitable for disabled people to reach, enter, or use as a result of design modifications
4. Readily understandable
5. Obtainable
6. Open to influence of (usually follow by “to”) as in “accessible to bribery”

Alright – so that’s what the term means.

Because accessibility is central to their existence, it only makes sense that it is something they not only focused on, but gotten really good at over the years in what they do.

If you’ve listened to this podcast for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard me talk about how some form of inclusion needs to be baked into your brand’s values — and that is the foundation of building an inclusive brand.

When you do that, it operates as your “north star” so to speak, and makes it integral to the way in which you operate.

Google demonstrates this isn’t something that just works in theory. They’ve built an accessible brand, because their mission, vision, and values mandates that they will be.

Set your quest to build an inclusive brand for success by incorporating some element of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging into your values.

Quick aside – based upon their mission, can you tell which inclusive brand type Google is? They are an “Oprah Car Giver” —> as in, “you get a car, you get a car, and you get a car!” Their goal is to include everyone.

Of course, that isn’t the inclusive brand type for every company. You can learn about the other inclusive brand types at episode – 29, “What Inclusive Brand Type Are You?”. Also, you can find out what your inclusive brand type is at inclusivemarketing.com/quiz. 

Infrastructure

It’s one thing to have accessibility or inclusion as a part of your values. It’s another thing to actually live into those values with the way you show up every day.

Google brings their mission to life by putting an infrastructure into place that enables them to ensure both inclusion and accessibility are part of the work they do from all phases.

Part of that infrastructure means having positions that focus on these areas.

Two positions from a marketing standpoint that help Google keep their focus on inclusion and accessibility, are:

• KR Liu – Head of Brand Accessibility
• Annie Jean-Baptiste – Head of Product Inclusion & Equity

With at least two high level positions whose entire job is ensuring the brand’s products are both inclusive and equitable, and another to ensure the brand is accessible – we know that Google is serious about ensuring that these areas are a natural part of how it operates.

Not only do these positions exist to ensure Google is inclusive, equitable, and accessible, but they’ve documented their approach in these areas as well, and made them available for other marketers to access.

Annie Jean-Baptiste has published the brand’s approach to product inclusion and equity, with her book Building for Everyone: Expand Your Market with Design Practices from Google’s Product Inclusion Team.

And KR Liu and her team documented Google’s journey to being more accessible and released it in a playbook they’ve made available for free, with their All In Inclusive Marketing Playbook, focused on Disability.

I’ll drop links to both of those in the show notes so you can access them easily if you want to check them out.

To be clear – diversity, inclusion, belonging, and accessibility are everyone’s job, not just the responsibility of those who’s core job is to pull it through.

But having positions whose primary role is to focus on these areas helps to ensure there is a systematic way that diversity, inclusion, belonging, and accessibility – are incorporated into the daily work of the team – rather than it being something that folks scramble to add at the last minute, or apply inconsistently in what they are doing.

So as you think building an inclusive brand, consider having someone within your team or organization (at a significant level) who’s core responsibility is ensure the team operates with an inclusive lens, and supports them with the infrastructure to do so consistently at the level you desire.

Product 

Google of course is a company that builds several products, and their objective is to ensure those products are inclusive and accessible.

Here’s an excerpt from Annie-Jean Baptiste’s book about inclusive product design, that gives you a glimpse into their approach in this area:

“At Google, we build products for the world. The people we design for come from different races, places, ethnicities, socio-economic positions, abilities, and more. Equity is not a moment or a point in time – it should be embedded into everything we say, do, and build. When we’re intentional about creating infrastructure to build for everyone –with everyone – that’s when product inclusion happens.

When creating products I recommend you always ask: Who else? Who else should be involved? Whose voice needs to be part of the process? As designers, developers, marketers, and creators, we have an opportunity to create products and services that make people feel seen. In order to do that, we must admit that we don’t know everything, and ensure that we include diverse perspectives, particularly the historically marginalized, at key points in the process – ideation, research, design, testing, and marketing. A human-centered approach means being humble, asking questions, and letting those with the lived experiences guide the way. Center the experiences of underrepresented communities, and build with, not for.”

So much goodness in the way they think about and approach inclusive product design.

And it really is just an embodiment of the principle “nothing about us without us” – because it really isn’t about extracting knowledge from a group of people and then going off on your own and creating something – for them and the rest of the people you serve.

Inclusive product design is about including the people your building and designing for in every aspect of the process from start to finish.

It seeks to include more people in the process, to ensure you’re designing for all the people you want to serve who have the problem your brand solves – and making sure they have both a seat and a voice at your design table.

Inclusion is a collaborative and distributed approach.

Besides, when you include the people your building products for in the process, you’re much more likely to build something that people within those communities are willing to buy.

If you want to reach a broader and more diverse audience, having a team that is representative of the people you want to serve is essential.

We’ll get into more of how Google does accessibility and what you can learn from it after this short break

Customer Experience

Customer experience is another way that Google focuses on accessibility. And when I say customer experience here – I’m really meaning it in more of an all encompassing way – that also includes employee and team experience – or experience of anyone they are interacting with as a brand.

The experiences Google delivers when people at Google are connecting or when people who are using their products, is accessible.

This one feels a little tricky to explain – because what we’re talking about is an accessible product that Google has built – but because this product is so central to the ways in which people interact and communicate – I wanted to highlight it specifically, because the application of it in our own businesses is relevant to how accessible we are.

I want to highlight this example with my own snafu.

So I did an interview with KR Liu, Google’s head of brand accessibility. KR identifies as queer, female, and disabled. 

When we were scheduling time to chat, KR’s PR rep booked the time on my meeting scheduler, which sends out a meeting invitation using my Zoom link.

I needed to record the call and have a transcript made for the purposes of creating content after the interview.

KR’s PR person asked if I could make sure I was on camera – because KR reads lips, and of course she couldn’t do that if I was off camera. Sure, no problem, I’m always on camera anyway for these calls.

But when I got on the call, I discovered that they prefer to use Google meet for meetings, not just because it is their product, but because of the accessibility features it has baked into the tool, like live captioning. 

Facepalm – I was so embarrassed – I was on a call to talk about and learn about accessibility with an accessibility expert – but the tool I was using to facilitate the meeting wasn’t the most accessible.

Quick aside that is related to this point. I was working on a consulting project earlier this year with some partners, where we did a client presentation. One of the consultants I was collaborating with was legally blind, and needed to use accessibility features baked into the meeting tool we were using.

The client preferred to use Microsoft teams for the meeting, but we let them know we preferred to use Zoom because of the accessibility features the consultant needed to use.

So this point isn’t about the specific tools – it is about thinking about the needs of the people you’ll be interacting and communicating with, and using the tools that enable the team to be included and fully participate – which means thinking about accessibility throughout the entire customer experience and communication process.

So if you have calls with clients, prospects, team members –thinking about accessibility in how you engage and interact with them is an essential part of showing them that they do indeed belong with you.

So think about accessibility throughout your customer journey – through every touchpoint people have with your brand, both internal to your company and for those consumers and customers you’re serving.

Marketing

Ok, and the last area of focus, which definitely isn’t the least area is marketing. Google focuses a lot of energy on making sure their marketing is accessible.

KR told me, that this is the whole reason why she has her position. She says, her whole job is about “My role really is to just bring a disabled lens into our creative, our product, our storytelling, really connect the brand and making sure that we’re being authentic and representing disabled people in all the intersections that we meet.”

Now when it comes to marketing – and making sure the marketing is accessible, they do a decent job. For instance, if you go to their Instagram, you’ll see captions on all the videos.

But where KR and the team are focusing on is really improving an area that both Google and the industry and media as a whole has fallen short on: representation of disabled people.

According to KR, a few years ago when Google did an internal audit, they found that only 1% of their marketing represented the disabled community – and representation in marketing across the board for all companies was about 2%.

Here’s what KR told me about this area of opportunity:

“And so the biggest challenge we saw was there was so much innovation happening in this space over the last couple of decades, and that’s Google’s history as well, but the marketing and the brands were not in sync with the innovation, right?

We clearly are missing the connection in that red thread. And so that’s been the biggest challenge is not to so much now get people thinking about accessibility, which has been much more top of mind, which is wonderful, especially in product innovation. But the marketing and brand piece is still catching up quite a bit.

So, so that’s been the biggest challenge is that that representation red thread between the two and how to do that authentically and to have your finger on the pulse of what’s happening in society and culture and what’s important to the disabled community, not only over the last many, many years where we were left out, but now, like what’s happening right now that’s important and and being authentic and real to that.”

KR also told me that their goal is to change the perception and narrative of disability, and the visuals and the stories they tell combined with increased frequency with which they tell and show them are a big part of that.

So when it comes to your marketing, being inclusive of this community — the lesson here is to focus on two areas. First, make your marketing accessible to people who are part of the disabled community. And the second is, to increase the disability representation in your marketing across the board – in your visual imagery, who you feature and prop up as experts, whose stories you tell as team members, as customers, as success stories.

Alright – that’s Google’s approach to accessibility.

And that’s it for this episode. If you found it valuable, please do share it with a friend, colleague, and your network – so we can get more people being accessible in their marketing.

And if you’ve been enjoying the podcast overall and would like to support the show, an easy way to do that is leaving a rating and review for it in your podcast player of choice. It really does go a long way toward helping more people discover the show – and I’d just be so thankful for doing it.

If you’d like more stories, insights, and examples about how to build an inclusive brand – do sign up for the Inclusion & Marketing newsletter. I’ll drop a link to it in the show notes so you can access it easily.

Until next time, remember – everyone deserves to have a place where they belong.

Let’s use our individual and collective power to ensure more people feel like they do.

Thanks so much for listening.

Talk to you soon.