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7.00 am. Your alarm goes off, and you roll over in bed a few times because it’s November, and it’s freezing, and sadly it’s not one of your work from home days. You might pop the radio or the TV on because it’s a little easier to take in the news when it’s in audio form despite how many news apps seem to send notifications to your phone these days, and get ready to leave the house.
7.15am. You’ve run out of milk. You knew you were going to run out of milk, but you also don’t know if you’re getting more milk – your supermarket delivery is supposed to be being delivered tonight, but unfortunately they’ve emailed you to say they’re making some substitutions. ...And even more unfortunately, because the email they’ve sent you is formatted like a table that details the items they’re substituting, it doesn’t actually work with your phone’s screen reader, so it’s a bit of an effort to read.
8.00am. You’re at the train station. It’s a pretty good job you know this journey off by heart because the boards showing the train times aren’t easy to read at all – not only do they change and flip through a carousel of three different lists of trains and times, the letters are glowing orange on a black background, which isn’t an ideal reading setup at all, and creates far more visual problems than dark (but not black) letters on an off-white background might do.
8.59am. You’ve made it to the office with almost a full minute to spare! Well done you. Unfortunately when you walk into the office, you realise that there’s somebody sat having a cup of tea at the hotdesking space that you usually use, and all of the other ones left face right into the middle of the room. This makes you feel quite observed and you find it difficult to focus on work when you know people can walk behind you and see what you’re doing- using a screen reader, maybe writing and reading a little less speedily than your peers, or even just taking a while longer to work through your assigned tasks for the day.
10.00am. It’s all systems go because you realise that towards the end of last week, you haven't done a task set for you by your manager. It was sent across via email and just popped in at the end of a long email about some other accounts you’ve been working on, and you’ve missed it. Reading through long passages of text even when you’ve got the help of text-to-speech technology is arduous, and sometimes you get really fatigued at the amount of information you have to take in, so by the end of the email you’re usually flagging a bit. It’s easy to miss things at the end of emails – you really wish your manager would send a separate email for separate tasks, or at least bullet point or colour highlight it so that you know that bit of text is something important and new.
12.00pm. It’s lunch. You decide to treat yourself to lunch and go across the road to a coffee shop. It’s getting close to Christmas and there are a lot of fun-looking seasonal drinks on offer, but unfortunately the boards behind the till are designed with festive red lettering on a background of moving snowflakes. It’s a nightmare to read and it’s taking you ages, and when you get to the cash register, you can see the person behind it getting a little frustrated with how long you’re taking to order. You just order a latte, because you don’t want to be a problem and hold up the queue further. It’s frustrating, but you know that he’s likely not doing it because he’s a horrible person – he’s probably being timed on his sales on the cash register, and might end up in trouble with his manager if a large queue forms that he’s not getting though fast enough, which leaves him anxious about taking the time to support customers who need the menu read out even if he's supposed to-- and wants to, too.
1.00pm. You head back to your desk and realise that there’s an email from HR waiting for you! You applied for a promotion after your team leader left last month, and you’ve been waiting for the results of your interview. Unfortunately, as part of the decision-making process, you’ve been assessed against a series of KPIs that directly correlate to the amount of accounts you can process on a weekly basis, and how fast you can move through these tasks. There’s also a section on there called ‘quality of communications and written work’ that you’re not super keen on either – how much do a few spelling mistakes in an email really matter in 2022? The job has gone to someone from a different department, and it’s disheartening, because you genuinely felt like the best fit for the role... and not to mention the higher salary might have been handy with the whole cost of living crisis thing.
2.30pm. It’s time for your main weekly update call! You’re not as comfortable taking it in the middle of the office as you would be at home or in your quiet hotdesk spot, but you carry on regardless. It’s difficult though, as you’re struggling to separate what’s being said through your headset from the noise in the office, and you’re not taking in as much of the information as you need to. Also the person presenting is moving through their slides at lightning speed, meaning you’re struggling to take notes. And did they really need to put flashing GIFs on every slide, too?
3.30pm. After the meeting from hell, you deserve a treat. You head over to the kitchen, where somebody has bought in a box of cookies for their co-workers – but unfortunately, you’re allergic to nuts, so you’re not sure if you can eat them. You flip over the box to take a look, but the writing is thin, tiny white text on a photo background, and packed into the bottom quarter of one side of the box – even the best text-to-speech devices might struggle with this and as it’s later on in the day, there’s nobody around who you feel comfortable asking. You look for a moment and then decide it’s not worth the effort; you’ll have an apple instead.
4.30pm. You’re free! Until tomorrow, that is. You walk out of work and to the train station, and find out that your train has been delayed by an hour and a half. It’ll be quicker to get the bus, so you wander over to the bus station, but the timetables up on the sides of the shelters are printed very small and because it’s sun-bleached, there isn’t much contrast between the background and the letters themselves. It takes you a while to read through the list to your stop and work out where you need to stand, and now there’s a queue of people standing behind you to try to look at the timetable, and you’re not finished, and now there’s a kid staring at you, and you’re ready for the ground to swallow you up.
5.30pm. You’ve made it home. You’re ordering take-out and watching Netflix tonight.
All of the above are potential scenarios: dyslexia manifests very differently for different people, and most people working with dyslexia might not be so unlucky as to have to deal with all of these and more on a daily basis. But many of us do encounter things like this every morning when we wake up for work, and it’s as a direct result of the world we live in and work in not being made properly accessible for everybody. When our working practices aren’t inclusive for everyone, it’s easy to make people with dyslexia or other neurodivergent minds feel stressed, burdened, and frozen out.
The person in this little exercise is also one of the relatively ‘lucky’ ones (we know, not the most accurate phrase of a day that looks even remotely like this one) – they’re employed in a job they like most of the time, they haven’t felt like they need to hide their dyslexia at work, and they’ve got a manager and HR department who have listened and arranged the necessary workplace support tech for them. Sadly not everybody is so well supported, and many people don’t choose to disclose their dyslexia at work because they’re afraid they might be passed over for promotion or feeling less secure in their role – which is kind of what happened here. As well as being inclusive and making sure work is accessible, we need to make sure that our promotion opportunities aren’t being assessed against a neurotypical set of criteria too - if not, we can end up with incredible neurodivergent employees sat for a long time in junior roles that don't suit their skills, and keep them on artificially low salaries.
Even when it comes down to the stressed-out coffee shop worker who isn’t given the freedom of time to provide a good customer experience and step in and help people when they need help, our working world just isn’t optimised for everybody yet. Accessibility is generally easier in theory than in practice, and when it gets weighed up against speed targets and financial targets, it tends to fall by the wayside – especially in harsher economic climates like the one we’re experiencing at the moment.
This is why workplace training is so important. No employer comes to the accessibility conversation with all the answers – sometimes, we need guidance on what’s helpful and what’s not, what needs to be done, and the most crucially, what we have to do to be better. It’s perfectly possible that we can create workplaces where everybody can thrive and flourish, from colleagues to customers, and once the work is done it creates a firm foundation for change across the board- when business changes, industry leaders take note, and when industry leaders get on that change, everybody else who hasn't already tends to start creating that positive change too.
We need to make sure we’re having the right conversations, and putting them into practice, at every level - no business is too small to make a difference.