A paper presented this week at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), in its Software Engineering in Society track, looked at what remote work is like for developers with disabilities. The researchers surveyed developers with disabilities, their leaders, and their teammates, then interviewed fourteen developers in depth: six autistic, six with physical disabilities, two d/Deaf.
The finding that stays with me is about perception. Leaders and teammates had, in the authors' words, a limited perception of the daily challenges these developers faced in remote collaboration. The improvements the participants asked for were ordinary: better accessibility in the collaboration tools, clearer communication practices, and management that adapts to the person.
I think this points at something I believe about distributed teams generally. Remote work removes the hallway, the place where a manager would have noticed that a meeting format was not working for someone. What is left is the tooling and the norms, and those are chosen by the team, which means they are chosen by its leaders.
So my view is that accessibility inside a team is a management job, not only a product requirement. Captions on by default, written agendas, decisions recorded, a habit of asking each person what works for them. None of it is expensive, and none of it happens until someone decides to look.
What has a teammate told you about remote work that you would never have noticed on your own?
Photo source: https://photos.robertstowe.com/cumberland-island