You're listening to a Community Story from Be My Eyes. Hi, my name is Laura Allen, and I happen to have a really rare visual condition that impacts my central vision. So while things are still peripherally clear for me, basically everything that I look directly at is heavily impacted with little flashers and areas of blur and distortion. So, I use a variety of different assistive technology to be independent and productive in my daily life. I lost vision in my left eye when I was 10 years old and then in my right eye when I was 14. So, right before I'm about to enter high school and at that point kind of had to figure out how to relearn, how to do just about everything when it came to school. There was a period of time, those early years of high school that were honestly just very challenging. I was one of the first students with a visual impairment to go through my high school, and no one really knew the best way to find accessible materials for me or provide accommodations in the classroom. It was a definite learning experience. I was very, very grateful to have the tremendous support of my family. Where if I didn't have materials that were accessible to me, I would come home from school and after very long days at work, my parents or my brother would read to me aloud, and my dad would help tutor me in my math classes, since the math teachers weren't quite sure how to work with a student at that time who wasn't able to see the chalkboard. It was a heavy period of reliance and I'm so grateful for my family for helping to fill in those gaps in those early years. But then we really started exploring lots of different assistive technologies, and we're able to find the right mix of technologies for me to regain my independence. This included text-to-speech software and some magnification and contrast adjustments, a number of different things. And a messy path of stripping books, stripping their bindings off and using a high-speed scanner to scan the pages and then convert the text with OCR software and then listen to the text. We got into a really good rhythm, and I was able to really regain my independence and use that method all the way through college. I attended Georgetown University and studied marketing and international business and music and had a wonderful support team there helping really partner with me on making sure I had accessible materials and could take my exams in an accessible way. It was a really fantastic experience and I loved my time at Georgetown. Then my senior year of college, I went to an event through Lime Connect. Lime is an amazing organization that helps to connect students with disabilities with some really awesome companies. I went to an event, kind of on a whim, one evening in Washington, D.C., and Google was there. I just remember hearing different perspectives from Googlers. I had never really thought about Google until that point. Hadn't really thought just since I didn't really know, like what ... could I see myself there? What would it be like for someone with a visual impairment there? That actual event really opened my eyes and made me think about the company for the first time for real. I applied and somehow was accepted. I started my journey at Google in California a little over 10 years ago, actually, and it's just been an amazing, amazing ride. I started at the company in the sales division and was doing account management for tech B2B companies, which was definitely very interesting. I did that for a few years, met some wonderful people, learned a lot. But I started to kind of reach out to different people at the company just with some feedback as a low-vision user. I was very, very warmly received and people would just say, you know, "Hey, let's grab coffee, let's talk through this. I want to better understand your feedback." I just started kind of feeling out what was this whole world of accessibility. What was everybody working on? What did the team structures look like? I started thinking to myself, this is where I want to be. This is where I feel like I could really add value. So I started doing side projects and learning the details. Of course, I have perspectives as someone who uses assistive tech, but there was a lot more to learn, obviously, about how all the different technologies work and different best practices for design. I was really grateful that I was supported. My manager was really supportive of me kind of going off and doing some side projects and partnering with other teams. I was eventually able to transition full-time into a role focused on accessibility on the Chrome team. It was just an amazing, amazing transition to be able to shift into something that I care so deeply about. I remember just having this transformative moment when I was in the prior job working so hard and working so many hours and just thinking to myself now, what would it be like if I could put all these hours towards something that I truly loved and truly cared about in the world? Once I made it to accessibility, I knew exactly how it felt and it was an amazing experience. I've been doing accessibility ever since at Google, and it's always an interesting, interesting journey. Every day is different, and I'm really proud of how far we've come. There's still a lot more to do. It's so critical for companies to be proactively and consciously working on hiring people with disabilities, as well as supporting them and retaining them. We all view the world in different ways and we'll be interacting with products or with technologies in different ways, using different tools. Our differences are what make us all beautiful. We need to be seeking and embracing these diverse perspectives, putting them into what we're building in order to make truly accessible products for everyone. Of course, this seeking and implementing diverse perspectives is amazing for whatever a company's output is, whatever the product is, but it's also really critical for the culture within that company. For example, I didn't really know many people growing up who had visual impairments. I didn't have many role models in this space. It wasn't until I got to Google where I had a really diverse team, and I had a number of people, and still do, who are low-vision or blind on the team. I can look up to these individuals. I have mentors. I can see people just doing so well in their careers with visual impairments. That has always been really, really inspiring to me and made me feel stronger. It made me feel like I really belong at the company, I'm not just an outlier. So it's really, really important to focus on building that really diverse set of employees to have a really truly inclusive environment and to make everybody feel like they really belong. It's so important to me to know that I have all of the necessary accommodations in place for me to be productive and independent in my role. Accommodations were just so, so important when I was in school in particular. Going through college with basically all of my assignments being on paper, that was not really accessible to me. Having this strong partnership with the student services team who helped to transform my materials into accessible formats in a really fast manner, that helped me to keep up with my schoolwork and remain independent and to get good grades. I wouldn't have been able to do it without their support and their ability to accommodate me and my needs. I'm super grateful that in my different jobs and my role at Google, I've had all the accommodations necessary and it really empowers me to be the best employee that I can be, add the most value I can. So, the accommodations aren't only good for me, they are definitely good for the company as well. When I first started my career right out of college, I definitely found myself struggling a bit when it came to disclosing my visual impairment. Trying to figure out when was the right time to tell people, how to tell people. A lot of people say that they don't know that I have a visual impairment or that I'm low-vision. I don't walk with a cane right now, I don't have a service animal. So, I often feel as though sometimes it's more like an invisible disability, and it's up to me to then disclose. Even when I do disclose, it can still be very difficult for people to understand what I mean when I say that I have a lack of central vision. Oftentimes, this led to difficult social situations. Definitely in college, walking around a campus and not being able to recognize faces, that was very, very hard in many respects. I found that happening in my job in the beginning as well. I had to figure out that right balance of when to tell people, but I will say one of the best experiences I've had in the workforce has been when I made the shift over into working full-time on accessibility. All of a sudden, I just didn't have to worry about that anymore. I was speaking so openly and so freely about my visual impairment because it actually added value to the conversations about design and about development for our products. It wasn't something I felt like I needed to worry about, when do I disclose and who do I tell? I feel like in this role, I can actually shout from the rooftops and be embraced by my teammates and by our leadership. That has been truly transformative for me. I've become so much more of an open person because of how my story was being received, and I'm super grateful for that. Thank you for listening to this Community Story from Be My Eyes. You can share your story too. Send it to mystory@bemyeyes.com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, download our app, or visit bemyeyes.com/community-stories for more.