Our journey to make LinkedIn more inclusive and accessible

Over the last few years, we have been redesigning LinkedIn to embrace the humanity and diversity of our community and to make the experience easier, more intuitive and more enjoyable for every member. Our goal is to make LinkedIn the most inclusive platform possible and provide tools and experiences that enable every professional to be productive and successful. We’ve made good progress, but have bigger ambitions and remain inspired to achieve more. 

Today, we are excited to announce several new updates and enhancements to make our platform even more inclusive for the over one billion people, globally, with disabilities or impairments. 

We’re enhancing our LinkedIn Disability Answer Desk (DAD), a dedicated team launched in 2018 to help members resolve problems using our platform. In the coming weeks, for our members who are blind or visually impaired, we will make the popular Be My Eyes service available, allowing these members to communicate directly with a Disability Answer Desk agent via video call to receive support. 

We also know that there’s a knowledge gap when it comes to building accessible and inclusive workplaces. Bridging this gap requires learning and awareness. To that end, we’re delighted to be rolling out a new series of LinkedIn Learning courses to help organizations create more accessible, inclusive workplaces. These include:

• Digital Accessibility for the Modern Workplace with Hector Minto. Minto, Accessibility Evangelist for Microsoft, explores the digital tools and best practices to build a solid foundation for inclusivity.
• Supporting Workers with Disabilities with Liz Johnson, co-founder of The Ability People (TAP), a social enterprise dedicated to empowering the global disability population. (Coming May 2021)
• Hiring and Supporting Neurodiversity in the Workplace with Tiffany Jameson, founder of Grit & Flow, a consulting firm that helps organizations build a more inclusive future. (Coming May 2021) 

We are assembling a myriad of support resources including our LinkedIn Coaches program to provide one-on-one assistance to job seekers with disabilities or impairments on tips and advice for connecting to opportunities using the LinkedIn platform. 

These updates build on the work we’ve done in the last several quarters, including: 

• We’ve updated our platform to include the ability to create and consume alternative text descriptions for uploaded images (on our Feed, in Groups, Company Pages, and articles) as well as font scaling support on our web, iOS (dynamic type), and Android apps. 
• Our most recent redesign was created to meet accessibility standards with layout decisions and elements that allow for text scaling, bigger touch targets, and an emphasis on contrast for readability. 
• Earlier this year, we added live captioning to our LinkedIn Live Broadcasts through our API, powered by Microsoft technology. When broadcasters (i.e. members like you!) stream to LinkedIn via our API Partners - Restream, Streamyard, Switcher and Socialive - they now have the option to enable auto-captions for streams in English. Viewers who enable captioning will see closed captions on Live broadcasts on LinkedIn mobile apps and Desktop Web whenever they are available. 
• We’ve added enterprise content captioning functionality to LinkedIn Learning, and Learning administrators are now able to add captions to their content via VTT file.
• And we made it possible for members to self-identify their demographics, including gender, race, ethnicity and disability - none of this information is visible on a member’s profile or used to identify the individual. We use this information to identify, understand, and drive toward equitable outcomes for everyone using our platform. 

We’re always open to feedback and would love to hear from you as to how we can make the LinkedIn experience even better. 

For the past 2 years, I've had the honor of serving as Executive Sponsor for our employee resource group to support people with disabilities, EnableIn. EnableIn generates awareness around disabilities and mental health, fosters an inclusive workplace for our people, and seeks to create economic opportunity for people of all abilities. Through this work, I’ve had the opportunity to understand first hand both the need to build technology, culture and systems to serve people with disabilities and the incredible possibility that is created when we do. The pandemic only exacerbated the challenges people with disabilities face in the workplace and we’re committed to doing our part to use technology and our platform to connect all people with the opportunity they deserve.