Back in May, 2024, I had the pleasure of attending the first Seattle Disability Connect meetup on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington. It was an amazing event with about 130 tech professionals with disabilities and their allies attending. Attendees were not just from Microsoft, but from many other tech companies and academic institutions in the area. The event featured four speakers, all disabled, from both startup and established companies and agencies. Leah Katz-Hernandez, who is Deaf, from Linkedin talked about her career and her role as Social Impact @ Linkedin leader. Margaux Joffe, who is neurodivergent, talked about her nonprofit Minds of All Kinds that supports neurodivergent people and works with companies to help them do better with their neurodivergent employees. Jerred Mace, who is a low-vision sports enthusiast, talked about his startup OneCourt that is pioneering tactile sports viewing for blind sports viewers. Amos Miller talked about his startup Glidance that is pioneering robot guides that could be an alternative to guide dogs for the blind. Before and after the presentations there was extensive mingling. During that time I met up with several former AccessComputing Team members who were now employed in various tech companies.
Seattle Disability Connect is the brainchild of former AccessComputing Team member Christopher Caulfield. He got lots of support from others at Microsoft and other companies to help his idea become a reality. The idea is to bring disabled people in tech and their allies together to form a supportive community and help advance their careers. Many companies have disability affinity groups, but Christopher’s idea was an intercompany group which would not be so isolated as an intracompany group. Christopher graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology with a B.S. in Computer Science, then went on to get a dual Master’s Degree in Computer Science from Cornell University and Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. He is currently a project manager at Microsoft where he has been employed since 2019.
There was a second Seattle Disability Connect meetup in August 2024, but I was out of town and couldn’t attend. I recently learned that Christopher's idea has spread. There was a San Francisco Disability Connect meetup held in October 2024. There are many tech centers in the US and each one could start a Disability Connect meetup. What a great idea.