I often wish that the diversity moment wasn’t mainly about race and sexual orientation but also about things like physical disabilities. When I look around my company of around 1000 people there is not a single wheelchair, no deaf or blind person.
Are you sure that is the case?
My company includes physical abilities as a key part of its diversity initiatives. I work with a principle engineer who uses an electric wheelchair. I am not aware of any well run diversity effort that does not include physical ability. Check with your company's diversity rep to see if they don't have physical ability as part of it. I would be surprised if they did not.
Sometimes the accommodations are just as hidden as the disability. Things like giving people flexibility about when they come and go at work, or putting someone's desk in a different location (near windows, or away from windows).
I admit that some folks specialize in physical manifestations of ADA (wheelchair ramps, elevators, bathrooms). In some sense, these are easier problems to solve -- you just need to pay a contractor to build a thing on the building. Accommodating hidden disabilities often requires getting people on a team to change their behavior or response to a behavior; a much harder problem.
I'd check to see if there are barriers preventing someone with physical disabilities from actually getting a job at your employer.
This includes the physical building (is it ADA complaint? is there a ramp or wheelchair-accessible way through the front doors? are elevators in good working order and clean? are there wheelchair-accessible bathroom stalls in the bathrooms, or gender-neutral facilities that are big enough to turn a wheelchair around in?) as well as process (is the health insurance comparable or better to a megacorp? is the company established and financially successful? is there diversity in the age of folks working there? can people just leave in the middle of the day if they have a medical appointment and come back later?).
My experience at Google has been that folks care about all kinds of diversity: race (both PoC and white people), gender (women, men, non-binary, and so forth), sexual orientation, as well as physical and psychiatric/invisible/mental disabilities.
Your company is smaller, so it might be choosing to only focus on certain kinds of diversity that either helps the business grow in a certain area (say, recruiting), or helps the business in some other way (say, builds goodwill with the company's customers). If your company succeeds and grows, it may be later able to spend more money running more kinds of diversity programs.
I wonder -- often people think of deafness or blindness in terms of 100% disabled.
What about people who have very narrow fields of vision (e.g. from macular degeneration or glaucoma), people with severe hearing loss that doesn't result in total deafness, etc.
Many people don't realize I'm deaf because I have a cochlear implant and a REALLY good set of coping strategies. Sometimes push will come to shove when I ask for accommodations and other parties don't believe they're necessary or that I "deserve" them because I'm not "really" deaf.
Engage your diversity team? Drive the changes you want to see? These are areas you can help with, and have a meaningful impact in pretty much anywhere.
