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Well, it certainly wasn't something I thought about growing up or in college in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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None of this came to the forefront until I had a child with a disability.

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Part of what we needed to do was come up with a vision for what was his life going to be like.

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And my wife and I thought long and hard about that.

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And the thing that kept coming to the forefront is that he would feel like he belonged.

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Think of who you are as a person now.

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You have a job, but you also have hobbies and interests and passions.

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And a lot of that was formed growing up, not just through the academic experience of school,

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but through the social and emotional experience of school.

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Being with lots of different kinds of kids and people and learning to be challenged in your presumptions

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and learning that diversity is a broad spectrum of people.

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Unless you live that diversity day in and day out, I don't think you ever grasp that.

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And I don't think you ever develop socially and emotionally the way that you need to.

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To belong when you're a child that uses a wheelchair, that has a significant speech disorder and other challenges,

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you need to be in a community that believes that all people belong in your schools,

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in your extracurricular activities, that all kids can learn, that all kids can go on to college.

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And when you think about that level of accessibility, you're talking about every part of our society.

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So thankfully, we're in a community that believes that kids with disabilities belong in general education

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because 30 years of research shows that inclusive education for kids with disabilities yields better outcomes

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academically, socially, in terms of their jobs, in terms of their access to college.

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Access, accessibility, inclusivity has to be a lens that you start from the very beginning

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when you're thinking about what software to purchase, how do you write code, who do you work with on your team,

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can we bring in a more diverse team of people to think about this, can we beta test our projects

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with people who have different challenges and different abilities.

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Once you have that lens of inclusivity and accessibility, you start looking at all different aspects of our society

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and saying, hmm, is this really designed in the best possible way?

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Is it the most universally designed technology?

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So I think that IT folks, you know, first they have to have that motivation.

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They have to believe that college is a place for all learners.

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They have to believe that college is a place for all learners.

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And there are increasingly students of all different kinds of abilities and disabilities going to college.

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There are actually, oh, up to 270 programs around the country at universities

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that are specifically geared towards bringing more students with disabilities into the college environment.

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So once you have that lens and that motivation, then you think,

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how am I going to universally design the technology from the beginning?

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And especially when you have the opportunity to take on new projects and build new infrastructure,

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if that's your lens from the beginning, you're going to save so much work

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in terms of trying to retrofit it down the line to meet new ADA requirements

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or new accessibility requirements.

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♪♪♪