We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Erin Perkins. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Erin below.

Erin, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear from you about what you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry and why it matters.

The common belief that accessibility primarily concerns two areas—physical accessibility and website accessibility—is overly simplistic. While both are highly relevant, this perspective neglects other aspects of accessibility.

In my journey of building a business, I’ve seen businesses place a high priority of focus on website accessibility whenever the topic of accessibility comes up. This focus frustrates me. As a deafblind individual, websites generally do not pose barriers for me. However, barriers emerge when businesses fail to include captions on their social media videos or neglect to inform whether their online courses are captioned.

This experience has highlighted to me that Corporate America is narrowly fixated on these two aspects of accessibility, overlooking the other aspects of accessibility. I am committed to broadening this focus and bringing attention to the full spectrum of accessibility needs.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m Erin, the founder of Mabely Q and Successible, the Biz Accessibility Shop. Launching Mabely Q was driven by my aspiration to assist female business owners from behind the scenes as their operations manager. In pursuit of knowledge and business growth, I often engaged with course creators, only to find myself frequently inquiring about the accessibility of their materials. My requests for captioning was usually the first time they got the request.

When asked how to caption videos, I found myself at a loss. However, determined to find a solution, I dove into learning the process. This journey led me to realize the significant gap in accessibility education.

I dived in to expand my understanding of accessibility beyond my personal experiences. I discovered that most available resources were tailored towards website accessibility for businesses, yet they were difficult to understand. Even though I consider myself smart, I struggled with understanding accessibility. It felt like navigating a complex, foreign language. This challenge nearly led me to abandon my efforts, wondering if it’s this challenging for me, how could other businesses possibly manage?

I’m really proud of launching Accessibility Made Easy, which showed me that people need and want the education around making their businesses accessible. This led me to building Successible, the Biz Accessibility Shop! I’m on a mission to make this a one-stop shop for business owners to ensure that every aspect of their business is accessible beyond just their website.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

The most effective way for me to attract new clients is by tapping into the audiences of others. This strategy works because individuals on my list are there for a specific reason and tend to remain engaged with my content. However, for continuous growth, it’s important to leverage the audiences of others. These groups often have a thirst for new information, and the topic of accessibility is often a topic that’s brand new to them!

Have you ever had to pivot?

I’m a elder millennial, or as I preferred to be referred to as a Xennial. (this is probably the most cliche sentence ever!) And I was raised with the belief that you graduate high school, go to college, and get a job with a corporation. Despite 12 years of loyalty, I was thrown out like a piece of trash.

I knew the layoff was coming (it was the 2nd time our department was restructuring, and this time was extremely different from the first.) I started to look for jobs during the restructure, and wasn’t finding anything. My last day with the company was January 19, 2018. About 2 weeks into unemployment, I told my husband that I was going to try to start my own business because I didn’t want to get stuck on the hamster wheel again. And I ran with it — I worked with a couple travel agencies helping then with graphic design, doing some virtual assistant jobs, and have been able to really build something out of the passion to help women entrepreneurs do it better than Corporate America.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mabelyq.com/
• Instagram: http://instagram.com/mabely_q
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MabelyQ
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mabely-q

Image Credits
Cait Kramer (for the ones that are bright) The dark one (credit, GET Cities)