Are you open to including team members with disabilities (like blindness) and diverse neurological perspectives (like autism), yet hesitant to proceed? Are concerns about commitment, testing deliverables, ownership, and quality of work, holding you back? Beyond this, let’s also acknowledge that ROI (Return on Investment) still remains a significant factor at the end of the day. As custodians of our businesses, despite our altruistic intentions to contribute to society, considerations of profitability remain essential. But have we considered a financially viable approach to include and empower diverse individuals?

Our talk aims to elucidate on the transformative power of enabling a workforce of differently abled colleagues. Specifically, we will share our experience of hiring, training, and placing both blind and autistic individuals into software-testing roles in projects.

We believe that the digital realm should be accessible to everyone, and our goal is to encourage employers and candidates alike to make this vision a reality. We will share stories where autistic and non-sighted individuals have recognized their potential in shaping the accessible digital landscape and have done high-quality testing on projects. We are so inspired and proud of the work done by these colleagues that we want to share it with the world outside and demonstrate how the inclusion of these individuals in our teams guaranteed comprehensive quality and accessibility assurance, for our digital solutions and deliveries.

We’ll talk about our customized pathway for autistic individuals, involving 4 months of hands-on training, real-world software assignments, ISTQB certification, and then successful project placements, thus unlocking their remarkable potential.

Having direct engagement in these endeavors, both as a trainer for individuals with autism and as a leader overseeing the Accessibility Practice including non-sighted testers, we are poised to share our firsthand insights. This encompasses our experiences, strategies, implementation, outcomes, success rate, and lessons learned.

Takeaways from the talk:

• Strategy to create an inclusive team that can perform high-quality testing for customers.
• Do’s and Don’ts of setting up such a team, based on our live experience in projects.
• Tailoring a training program for autistic and blind individuals.