By Nereida (Neddy) Perez NCLBN Board Member and Principal of D&I Creative Solutions
For more than 58% of corporations, nonprofit and government agencies with Diversity & Inclusion programs in place, Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)/Business Resource Groups (BRGs) are at the heart of their corporate culture transformation. These groups were originally created to help support diversity awareness and enable safe conversations on race, gender, gender orientation and disability topics to take place. Many of these groups are volunteer based and report into the company’s diversity &inclusion office. ERGs/BRGs have in past been crucial to identifying and growing the leadership skills of employees, recruiting talent, connecting and uncovering new market niches to position products and services and serving as advocates for policy and process changes. Normally, ERGs/BRGs are provide with an executive/corporate sponsor to help coach and guide the group within the company. The sponsors are selected from the company’s executive leadership team and often report directly to the CEO or President of the business.
What is your role as an executive/corporate sponsor?
Executive Sponsors are critical to the success of ERGs/BRGS because they serve as advocates within the company to help advance understand about disabilities. They also serve as a coach to the employees who have volunteered to serve on the leadership committee of the ERG/BRG. As a coach, the executive sponsor, can help employees understand the company’s policies processes, business strategy and how to navigate the corporate culture to advocate for internal change or help connect with customers. On a personal level, the ERGs/BRGs provide an excellent opportunity to learn and connect with employees who are helping the company meet its business goals. Executive sponsors are often expected to participate in community activities as spokespeople and/or attend internal events in a leadership capacity.
It is okay to be uncomfortable & not know the answers
Just like a new job assignment or career opportunity, you are not expected to be an expert in the topic of disabilities management or issues. However, an ideal sponsor takes time to learn and understand the employee group they will be working with. Think of this as a stretch assignment that will enable you to learn about the employees in your company, their families, and some of your customers. It is also a good opportunity to learn more about yourself and leadership skills in working with a diverse group of people.
This is also a prime opportunity to reach out to the Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Office to ask for resources and information to better understand the disability space. Here are some questions you may want to ask the D&I Office:
• How many employees does the company have that are part of the disability community? What percent of employees in management and in operations have a disability? What are the national statistics of our company as compared to our competitors or other companies?
• What does the membership of the ERG/BRG consist of? % or parents? % of people with disabilities?
• Do we collect the opinion of employees with disabilities on our annual/quarterly corporate employee engagement survey? What are the major challenges by business, race, gender and/or disability?
• What policies do we have in place to ensure the protection/safe guard of the employees, families with disabilities?
• What is the process for handling requests for workplace accommodations for employees with disabilities?
• What are the legal requirements our company must meet? How are we doing?
• What are some community organizations we partner with? What does that partnership look like?
• How do we compare with other companies with regards to hiring and retention practices? What is our rate of hire of people with disabilities?
• Are there mentoring or internship programs in place for people with disabilities?
• What are our goals and what are the D&I Office’s expectations of executive/corporate sponsor?
• What are some materials I can read to get familiar with the issues facing the group
How can ERGs/BRGs Benefit the Company?
The ERGs/BRGs are the backbone of D&I Office initiatives because they provide opportunities for employees at every level to get involved in supporting diversity awareness and helping to advance discussions on policies, processes and systems that may impede the advancement or development of people with disabilities.
ERGs/BRGs in many companies have been attributed with increasing business operations and productivity performance, supporting recruiting efforts and even uncovering new business market niches that have generated new business revenue for the company.
The critical focus areas that ERGs/BRGs are often asked to develop business goals on by the D&I Office include:
How Can You Support the ERG/BRG?
As an executive sponsor, you will be serving as a coach and mentor to the ERG/BRG and to employees who have volunteered for a leadership role on the committee. Many of the volunteers for these leadership roles are individual contributors and some maybe frontline managers who have never served in a leadership role themselves but who are looking to grow and make a difference. For many this will also be the first time that they are working with a corporate executive. Unlike being a VP of a department or business unit where you can direct activities, serving as the executive sponsor of an ERG is an opportunity to be a coach and advisor that helps guide others and not direct. As an executive/corporate sponsor this is your opportunity to help ERG/BRG volunteers better understand the company’s strategies and business processes as well as help develop their leadership skills. In your role, you will help serve as a sounding board for volunteers’ ideas, proposed goals and programs.
We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.
To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email
Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all of the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside of it.
Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers), both for Windows and for MAC users.
Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs, there may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to