These are the stories of persons with disabilities who have found and thrived in fulfilling work and of the workplace leaders with the confidence, capacity and knowhow to employ and mentor them. 
I'd like to share a bit of my career story with you and and some of my learnings and and reflections which hopefully will resonate with you. So, first a little bit more about me. Uh I've been an academic researcher for 25 years, a post-secary educator for the same amount of time. um an inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility professional for 20 years, a founder and leader in the discipline of accessibility and STEM for 15 years, a research strategist and administrator for the past 10, and a nonprofit executive for the last five. So, those of you who are relying on your eyesight, I'm older than I look. For those of you who are relying on audio, I'm younger than I sound.

What that tells you is is even when they're functioning, our senses don't always tell us everything about our world. The idea project is is all about translating innovation for workplace for workers with disabilities into workplaces. Uh as a social innovation laboratory, we are all about the most basic definition of what we call in the sciences translational research. Scaling from pilot to process. But I do think it's important just settle for a moment on the concept that not all persons with disabilities have the same set of experiences. our lived experiences, our interacting social identities, intersecting social identities, whether we're born with disabilities or we acquire them later in life, whether we identify as living with multiple disabilities, all of those play a substantial role in in shaping how we interact with the world and how the world interacts with us. And at CNIB research, my my team spends its time understanding both the personal and systemic aspects of that lived experience and that interaction between the person and the systems of society is at the center of our research philosophy. A well-intentioned system can still fail a person because of a lack of understanding of that interaction. I have a PhD. The employment rate of persons who are blind or partially sighted with PhDs is 55%. The employment rate of a high school dropout who does not identify as living with a disability in this country is 60%. I'm going to put that another way. I'm less employable than my neighborhood high school dropout. Right? And and so so when when we think about this space, we we think usually that education begets employment. And that that's true up to a certain point. Um and uh and and so so the experiences that all of us have uh really come from that space of who we are and and and what what spaces do we live in and what are the systems that we uh interact with in in terms of um in terms of the things that we want to do in our life today. I could tell you the story of of the the uh the blind first generation immigrant not born in Canada uh science prodigy the the one who started high school when he was 10 and post-secary when he was 15. the one who wasn't diagnosed with congenital cataracts until he was 10 months of age and and lives with neurological changes to his brain because his um his sight loss was not uh was not identified until the point after his visual cortex has started to do stuff. I I could tell you that you speaking with a real life Sheldon Cooper. I could share the message that anyone with a disability can succeed in the workplace. And you know what? Those are all true stories. Every last one. Those are powerful messages. Every last one. But I want to tell you the story behind the story. And I want to share with you the biases and attitudes that we need to counter and remove in order to achieve the goals of this important work that we're doing together over the next six years. My biography says I'm the world's first congenally blind geneticist. And that is empirically true, but it's not what I set out to be. One of my first genetics profs said to me on the first day of class, "Wow, you're the first blind geneticist I've ever heard of." Now, I thought to myself, "No, that that can't be right." And I did what any good scientist would do. I sought the evidence. Turned out she was actually right. Um, I wanted to be a science teacher. In fact, my mother was a science teacher. My older sister was trained to be a science teacher. My, oddly enough, my wife was trained to be a science teacher. Um, you could argue that that that runs in the family. Um, I certainly wanted to be the first to do something or learn something in my field. I mean, science, after all, is a great place for somebody to be if we want to be explorers of knowledge or to discover or learn something new. But it was never in my mind to be the first blind person to do it. I've claimed that identity now, just as for the Marvel fans in the audience, Tony Stark is Iron Man. I am the world's first congenity blind geneticist. But that identity comes with a price. It comes with several, in fact. First, the price of misunderstanding. People that I know who know me well have misunderstood why I chose my career path. And in misunderstanding that have also misunderstood or misrepresented me as a person, as an individual. Second, the price of trailblazing. Nobody did it before me. So there were no role models, no precedents, no examples, no sponsors, no community. Being the first, I've discovered, is very, very lonely. Being the only as in the only person with a disability in your space is also very isolating. This is one of the reasons I choose to spend a lot of professional and personal time on mentorship and sponsorship as well as on capacity building in the space of accessible and inclusive research. Loneliness and isolation in our professional and personal lives is a very hard thing and in my mind not to be propagated to the next generation. Third, the price of disbelief. Well, you can't be a scientist with a disability was a common refrain. The word can't was used in the context of capability, in the context of permissiveness or lack thereof, and in the context of disbelief, and sometimes all three at the same time. English is such a wonderful language. Even today, I have a mentee who started their relationship with me by asking, "How did you navigate the transition away from science to do what you do now?" Asking me essentially how I left a discipline and skill set that I actually haven't left. But I was born in and grew up in a part of the world where the supports and services we take for granted in Canada for persons with disabilities, leaving aside whether those services work or not or effective or not, they just did not exist. And they still don't exist to this day. That meant no access to a public school education for me while I was growing up. No access to assist of technology, no access to disability support, no access to a network for me, my parents, or my siblings. But it also meant no one to gatekeep or to tell us that something was possible or not possible. And within this lack of systemic or personal support came an opportunity. The opportunity to try and to succeed or not without anyone biasing my parents or myself one way or the other. Now I don't wish growing up with a lack of support on frankly anybody. But I do wonder how to capture that opportunity to try within a support system that can be unintentionally restrictive. Finally, there is the price of cognitive load and mental health. The toll that I experience being a scientist and a researcher in a system that frankly doesn't think I should be here and is itself unfriendly to persons with disabilities as practitioners of the research craft. That's something that's been there from day one. And it's also something that I wasn't anticipating, couldn't prepare for, and can only live with each day. We don't talk enough about the extra work, in gigantic air quotes, that persons with disabilities undertake to live our lives and participate in society and the little points of advocacy or education that we do multiple times a day, nor about the toll that these effects take. Everyone's energy will everyone's bucket is finite and needs replenishment. And even if we all have the same energy reserves, I as a person with low vision have to spend that energy that much more and that much more quickly on a daily basis, whether is at work or in my community. When we think about accessibility for persons with disabilities in the workplace, often we focus on the transactional nature of the work, accommodations, a word by the way, which I actively loathe, uh toolkits, resources, checklists, and mediating the relationship between employer and worker. And yeah, those are absolutely important. They help us get jobs. But I say, yeah, so too are the policies, the practices, and the systems of the workplace, the attitudes and the biases of our co-workers and our managers and our own sense of internalized abelism. These two must be addressed in our work, and addressing them collectively will ensure a truly inclusive workplace for us all.