Transcript for Welcome - Day 2
(Alycia Anderson) Good morning, everyone. Welcome back to our second day of AccessibilityPLUS 2021. The global conferences conference of how businesses empower accessibility and why they should. Do we, did we have an amazing day of presentations yesterday, entertainment or what?
So informative, so engaging. So just stellar. Honestly, all presentations and videos are now available on demand on our website. So please, if you missed anything. Definitely check them out as you have time. I'm Alycia Anderson, I emceeing this event, so you'll see me today and throughout tomorrow.
I have blond hair, green eyes, tanned skin and another huge smile on my face because I'm super excited to have been invited to be a part of this event. I am wearing today a dark blue shirt with an Accessibility.com logo on the left hand side.
My disability is sacral agenesis and I lived my life from a wheelchair. So who am I? Why was I invited to be here with you all today? Good question. I am a motivational speaker. I am a corporate diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility consultant, founder of the Alycia Anderson Company.
I hold a European master's degree in adptive physical activity, a degree that emphasizes the benefits, practices and principles of inclusion, something that's all near and dear to our hearts. I during my studies when I was in Belgium, I also worked for the International Paralympic Committee as a member of their educational committee.
This was frankly a bucket list opportunity for me. And in that we wrote and published something called the Paralympic School Day Project. It was an educational program that was distributed globally that taught our youth about inclusion, disability and the Paralympics and all of the goodness that comes along with all of those things.
My most recent accomplishment, another bucket list moment I have was recently invited to give a TEDX talk in South Lake Tahoe, titled Disabling Abelism: The Modern Pathway to Inclusion. That was just released last week, so I wanted to announce that to all of my peers, if you have time.
Check it out. Let me know what you think. You can find out information about me, my TEDX talk if you visit my website. AlyciaAnderson.com. Alycia is spelt with a Y. And for those of you that cannot still find me, you can go to inclusionsuperwoman.com, a fun redirect by my husband for my website.
A personal note, I am beyond thrilled and happy to be a part of this event and be among so many like minded thought leaders, experts in the accessibility space. Who are dedicated to the advancement of inclusion and accessibility specifically at work.
For coming from somebody, me, who has worked my entire life from high school again, being the first waitress in a wheelchair ever, all the way through my career to being a Vice President of Sales for a technology company and many jobs in between.
It's not always been an easy road. And so to sit here and learn from the experts something that I have had to navigate on my own most of my career, which is accessibility. Learn about the tools, learn about the advancements and all of the incredible things and companies and resources that are available today for all of us
to take advantage of. It's amazing. We have come so far from where we have been. It's not saying there isn't a lot of work to still do, but for me, my goal in being a part of this industry and sharing my story to communities and companies to help them better understand the true inherent benefits of building a
diverse and inclusive and accessible workplace in society. This is just an honor of a path that I'm on. And for me to have the opportunity to shine some light about how are each one of our diversities are core to the qualities that make each one of us uniquely qualified and able to contribute in life and at
work? It's it's amazing. So, you know, goal being shifting the disability conversation from a they conversation to a we conversation and really rightsizing every day obstacles so we can open our minds to a world of possible. And that was the theme of yesterday, and I'm just again, I'm thrilled just with all the content.
Its been awesome. Disability it it crosses all boundaries within the diversity and equity and inclusion spectrum and. There's a bridge, a pathway in making this world a better place for all of us. And so this work that I'm doing is very near and dear to my heart, and I really just hope that I'm going to help people
see the help the world see people for people and me for me. Day one of the conference, a success. I think you all can let us know what you think in the chat, but we unlocked the potential of assistive technology together and we learned about amazing companies and tools that are advancing that.
Day two of the conference, our focus is going to be to explore actionable solutions for an inclusive workplace. But before we kick that off, we're going to do housekeeping again, so all of this information can be found on our home page via video.
But I wanted to walk through a couple of key things. If you have any questions related to the presentations, please type them in the box to the right of the video screen. We had lots of engagement yesterday. Please continue to do that.
If you have any technical issues, please click the support button for assistance. Also above the video window, there is a navigation for things like agenda, speaker information, so you can dove into the backgrounds and bios of all of our amazing speakers.
Information about our sponsors who this event would not be possible without. You can go into our exhibitor hall, dive into all of their amazing products and see how they can benefit your businesses from an accessibility standpoint, as well as there's a discussion link.
So if anyone is interested in having chats with other attendees about the presentations, definitely utilize that. This is a community, so there's a community link where we can make connections with attendees, network and really learn from each other as we're here.
The networking opportunities are endless. I know for me my social media, I had a ton of emails last night. I made connections with so many insightful, really cool people, so let's keep that going. If you choose to share this conference or any any of the goodness that you receive from it, please on your social media, use our
hashtag AccessibilityPLUS2021. And then also, if you need additional navigation to get back to homepages on on the site, just click on the Accessibility Plus logo and that will navigate you home. One last thing from the navigation standpoint, don't forget to click on gamification, we've got prizes that have been donated.
We've got so you can jump on the leaderboard, check out who is winning and you can engage with that by going into our exhibitor hall, engaging with our our sponsors, and that will enter you to win some of our prizes.
Huge thank you to the Bureau of Internet Accessibility. You have a chance to win three prizes Amazon gift cards, the $200 prize, a $100 prize and a $50 prize again. Check leaderboards for details. Big, huge shout out to our closed captioning sponsor, 3Play Media, closed captioning is available throughout the conference.
So let's definitely kick this off, our first speaker is Craig Leen. He has experience as a city attorney for Coral Gables, director of OFCCP, and he's an advocate for persons with disabilities, and we're looking forward to having some insight from him.
Craig, take it away.
