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Home Blog How Workplace Accessibility Impacts Career Progression
Research suggests that only 47% of blind and low vision professionals feel confident about advancing in their careers.
Danielle Lane
June 3, 2026
That figure may surprise some employers.
It doesn’t surprise me.
Many blind and low vision professionals have spent years navigating environments where participation requires extra effort, information arrives later, and opportunities are easier to miss. After a while, that shapes how attainable career progression feels.
The conversation around advancement usually focuses on performance, ambition, and leadership potential.
Accessibility rarely enters the discussion.
It should.
People are not promoted simply because they are talented.
Most careers are built gradually. People learn new skills, take on larger responsibilities, contribute to important projects, and build relationships with the people around them. Over time, those experiences shape how others see them and what opportunities become available.
Accessibility affects every part of that process.
Most accessibility conversations focus on whether someone can complete their assigned work.
Can they access the document?
Can they use the software?
Can they join the meeting?
Those questions matter, but they set a surprisingly low bar.
Career progression depends on access to the opportunities that surround the work itself: training, leadership development, high-profile projects, performance conversations, and the everyday interactions that help people build relationships within an organization.
When those experiences are not fully accessible, the effects often appear long before promotion decisions are made.
Training is one of the most common pathways to career growth.
Development opportunities often contain barriers that are easy to overlook. Learning platforms may not work well with assistive technology. Training materials may rely on inaccessible PDFs, diagrams, or visual content. Employees may spend time requesting accommodations while everyone else has already started learning.
Development opportunities are often time-sensitive. When one employee can begin learning immediately and another must wait for accommodations, find workarounds, or spend additional effort accessing the same material, they are not starting from the same place.
Some employees begin the process already carrying a deficit.
The issue is not simply access to information. It is access to the same opportunities for growth.
Many careers accelerate through stretch assignments and special projects.
These opportunities allow employees to demonstrate skills outside their day-to-day responsibilities and build credibility with colleagues and leadership.
Accessibility barriers can influence who gets those opportunities.
Sometimes the obstacle is technical. Sometimes someone assumes a project is too visual and decides not to involve a blind employee at all.
When talented employees are consistently overlooked for visible work, their capabilities become less visible as well.
Organizations often invest heavily in leadership development programs.
Those programs should be accessible from the beginning, not adapted later.
An inaccessible exercise, training portal, assessment tool, or workshop may seem like a small problem in isolation. Over time, barriers like these can discourage employees from participating or prevent them from gaining the same leadership experience as their peers.
The result is fewer opportunities to build the skills, relationships, and experience that support advancement.
Performance reviews help shape promotions, raises, and succession planning.
Managers need to understand the difference between a performance issue and a barrier created by an inaccessible system.
They also need to recognize potential where they see it.
When blind employees are given fewer opportunities to contribute visibly, they may appear less ready for advancement despite being equally capable. What looks like a gap in experience may sometimes be a gap in opportunity.
The most important barriers are often the hardest to measure.
A blind employee may miss information that was only presented visually during a meeting. They may receive updates later than colleagues because information was communicated through screenshots or visual channels. They may be left off a project because someone assumes participation would be difficult. They may miss out on social events, networking opportunities, or informal conversations where relationships are built.
None of these moments are likely to appear in a performance review.
Most seem small enough to dismiss.
Careers are often built from small moments.
Relationships are formed in conversations after meetings. Reputations are built through repeated contributions to projects. Expertise becomes familiar when colleagues see someone participating week after week.
Those interactions create visibility. Visibility creates trust. Trust creates opportunity.
When blind employees miss out on enough of those interactions, they can slowly disappear from conversations they never knew were happening.
The problem is not that people actively decide to exclude them.
Often, nobody notices they have been excluded at all.
When promotion decisions eventually arrive, the difference may look like confidence, readiness, or leadership potential.
In reality, part of that difference may have been created years earlier.
It may have all started with a meme in the team chat that a blind employee didn’t know to laugh at.
Workplace accessibility is often treated as a technology issue, a compliance issue, or an accommodation issue.
It is also a career issue.
People cannot build relationships, demonstrate their strengths, develop leadership skills, or advance professionally when they are consistently excluded from the experiences that make those things possible.
Career progression depends on access to opportunity.
Accessibility helps determine who gets it.
