LinkedIn now allows users to use a standardized "accessibility" job title in their profile.
In recognition of October being National Disability Employment Awareness Month, or NDEAM for short, popular Microsoft-owned professional social network LinkedIn announced a slew of updates and resources for its some 850 million members. The news came in the form of a blog post penned by the company’s vice president of engineering Erran Berger, published on October 20th.
“We hope our learnings and product updates further the conversation around building inclusive [and] equitable workplaces everywhere,” he wrote in the lede.
Berger begins with the most pertinent information up front, which is that conversations about the disability community and inclusivity are happening at a more rapid rate. Accessibility in the workplace has steadily become “an important conversation globally,” according to Berger. He notes the company has tracked a 33% year-over-year increase in people sharing insights and ideas pertaining to accessibility, as well as job listings with the word “accessibility” in the title have spiked significantly since September 2019—they’ve seen a 171% increase.
LinkedIn’s findings are aligned with the broader societal push in rising accessibility awareness. Things like Apple’s CODA winning this year’s Best Picture Oscar, as well as the proliferation of captioning on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, have given the disability community much-needed time in the limelight from able-bodied people. Like with TikTok and Instagram—not to mention Twitter and Facebook—LinkedIn’s strides to build a more accessible and equitable experience for disabled people lend further credence to the notion that people with disabilities do, in fact, have a heavy hand in shaping internet culture.
Elsewhere, Berger shared a slew of other accessibility-focused details coming to the Bay Area-based company’s service. They include the ability to add dyslexic thinking as a skill, higher contrast and automatic captions in videos, and alt-text functionality in the Campaign Manager advertising feature.
“At LinkedIn, we’re on a journey to make accessibility a core principle of our inclusive product design and engineering,” Berger said in a statement provided to me. “By adding accessible features like auto captioning for video or creating standardized accessibility job titles, we can help even more of our members connect to knowledge and opportunity on our platform.”
Of note, Berger wrote the company’s Get Hired editor, Andrew Seaman, will interview Neil Barnett, Microsoft’s Director of Inclusive Hiring and Accessibility, on Thursday, October 28th. The two will discuss the most common questions disabled job seekers have when searching for work. Regular readers of this column will recall Barnett was interviewed back in May. He talked about the embrace of neurodiversity in the workplace and Microsoft’s role in creating the Neurodiversity Career Connector tool, meant to connect neurodiverse people with employers.
Anyone interested in Seaman’s live sit-down with Barnett can sign up here.
