Niall Betteridge

I'm an IT architect at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

I've been working very closely with JobAccess for the last 10 years or so and they have certainly made a huge difference to me being able to do my job properly.

I depend very heavily on lip-reading and if I'm not able to see people, communication can be a huge challenge for me.

There are many barriers to people living with disabilities in the workplace.

The first barrier is really about people's awareness and how people can help in playing a part in being more inclusive.

There are very basic changes that people can make in order to make it inclusive, but people don't know what actions to take or what role they can play.

It's not a major difference in how we work, but it's just a certain attention to some detail that we have to remind ourselves over and over until it becomes normal for that disability.

But of course there's always more to do. What I noticed when I first joined PwC was the maturity of the inclusiveness. I found that maturity made it much easier for me to do my job effectively and to work with colleagues.

Our main focus is solving complex problems for our clients. And in order to do so, we need to make sure that we have the most talented and innovative and forward-thinking people.

People with disability are an untapped talent pool and we acknowledge that they bring differences.

Advice I'd give to other organisations that are looking to hire people with disability predominantly is that it's really not that hard.

We all have differences. None of us come without a different need.

Making sure that we're asking people with disability what their needs are is one of the most important things that we can do.

You're missing out on huge amounts of talent. You're missing out on great employees. You're missing out on very loyal employees.

So, yeah, go ahead and do it.