“The biggest challenge people with disabilities face is other people’s perceptions”

Tony Ward tells us about his experiences starting his career as a Chartered Accountant and adapting to a new working reality after he began to lose his sight in his twenties

I had a very ‘ordinary’ early life growing up in Monaghan. I was of a generation where it wasn’t so commonplace to go to college, but I was always reasonably academic and chose to study commerce at UCD. 

I had no particular focus on going on to do accountancy, but I guess the subjects I studied were already oriented towards accountancy and business. 

Looking back now, almost 40 years later, I don’t know whether I was lucky or smart, but choosing to become a Chartered Accountant turned out to be a great decision from a career perspective. I’ve never had any sense that I went in the wrong direction.

I began my career in contract with a smaller firm—now long gone after many mergers over the years. 

Like all trainees, I started at the bottom and found working at a smaller firm to be of great practical help. I qualified as an Audit Senior in 1989, moved to Deloitte for two years and, from there, went into a management role in practice.

It was around 1990 that I became aware that things I used to be able to do fairly easily were becoming more difficult.

I was losing my sight, but it wasn’t until 1994 that I was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa, a genetic condition that causes sight to degenerate over time.

Those four years without a diagnosis were the most difficult for me, both personally and professionally. 

I was desperately trying to survive in the sighted world and many things became more difficult, and eventually impossible. 

It may sound strange to say it now, but it wasn’t obvious to me at the time exactly what was going on. 

I think the human response when faced with all kinds of challenges is often to try to survive in the moment. 

It’s perhaps only afterwards that we realise what was actually going on. My diagnosis in 1994 came as a huge relief.

It’s hard to believe in 2022, but back then losing my sight meant that I basically had to stop working. 

Computers and adaptive technology were in their infancy, and I just couldn’t read any more. 

At that point, I embarked on a new career pathway—less direct than most in the profession. 

Technology began to improve and one of the most important decisions I made was to learn to touch type. 

Around that time, I and others were gradually starting to realise that, just because I couldn’t see didn’t mean I didn’t have the skills to do a lot of the jobs sighted accountants could do—think clearly, solve problems, and be part of a team. 

Definitely then, and even now, people can be too easily judged at face value. Unfortunately, this means that your most easily identifiable, defining characteristics—in my case, my sight loss—can be a real disadvantage. 

At that time, many doors were closed—both to me, and on me. Fortunately though, there were enough open doors, even then, to allow me to pursue a rewarding, constructive and worthwhile career.

Here, I have to mention Access Support Services at Chartered Accountants Ireland. I was extremely reluctant to engage with the service at the outset. I thought, “what can they really do apart from sympathise with me?”

But, for whatever reason, I decided to reach out, initially to Derek Snow and then Oliver O’Brien. Oliver (who only recently retired from the Institute) was a huge support. He encouraged and facilitated me to go to Institute events and introduced me to others. For that, I am extremely grateful. 

I think the biggest challenge people with disabilities face is often other people’s perceptions and attitudes. 

This is much improved nowadays with genuine engagement on equality, diversity and inclusion and a much more diverse society than 30 years ago. Challenges remain, however, including preconceptions of what blindness means and assumptions about what you can and can’t do. 

There are also the very practical challenges involved in everyday tasks—reading hard copy documents, shopping, transport, participating in sport, traveling, the basics of working full-time, and walking into things if I’m not careful! 

I suppose one way for a sighted person to understand my experience would be to close your eyes and try to go about your daily life.

That said, technology and a multitude of very considerate family members, friends and colleagues have all made this easier for me. 

So, while everything starts from a position of potentially being difficult, good planning and decent workarounds make it all much more possible. 

Nowadays, I enjoy a very fulfilling work life, and numerous work- and career-related interests, but getting to this point was neither easy nor inevitable.

In my experience over the years, very few employers actively start from a position of discrimination—but we all know, through training and education, that bias is ever-present, including unconscious bias. 

The phrase I use to describe how this works is, “the making of assumptions”. We all make incorrect assumptions all the time based on sub-optimal information or flawed perceptions. 

So, while the world of employment has improved greatly over the years, much more remains to be done to ensure that we are truly fair and unbiased.

People with disabilities and other differences deserve a fair crack at fulfilling their expectations of obtaining and retaining work. 

We wouldn’t like to be discriminated against, so we should not put ourselves at risk of discriminating against others.

My advice to employers here is to be fair and equitable. Don’t make assumptions about employees or candidates who have disabilities and get professional advice if you need it. 

There are organisations like AHEAD (ahead.ie) working to create inclusive environments in education and employment for graduates with disabilities, and many other sources of excellent information about people with specific disabilities that will give any employer the resources they need. 

The essential ingredient here is that the employer is genuinely open to all of this and has the right attitude. Without this, it doesn’t matter how many resources you have—­­it will be inadequate.

It was one small private company I worked with 20 years ago that gave me my first breakthrough in obtaining employment in an open competition. 

I am very good friends with the Director to this day. When I asked him why he gave me the job, he said I was the best candidate.

He knew I would be able to do the work as a person with a visual impairment because, he said, “I figured you would figure it out and that it was really none of my business!”

That was worth more than anything to me and I flourished in that role for six years. It just shows how much attitude matters.

The details can always be figured out, unless the person hiring you really believes your disability is an issue—then, it won’t work.

I had a similar experience with The Wheel where I was Director of Finance from 2016 to 2022. They were a bit apprehensive about hiring me, simply because they didn’t know what they didn’t know.

In other words, they didn’t know how I would interact with the normal volume of information any Director of Finance would be expected to handle—but, if I can put it this way, they took the risk.

By risk, I don’t mean me as a person or professional. What I mean is that they were comfortable not fully knowing or understanding what they didn’t yet know or understand.
If you look at equality for people with disabilities in the wider working world and in society as a whole, the bottom line for me is that, if we are treated fairly and equitably, then we have the same likelihood of benefiting from opportunities in life as everyone else. 

As it stands, unemployment rates among people with disabilities are much higher than in the general population.

There may be genuine reasons for some of this disparity, but definitely not all of it—and employment opportunities really matter because there are so many benefits that go along with them.

I am talking about active engagement, social interaction, economic benefit, and the power to make decisions about where and how you live, and what you do. 

So, to the extent that people with disabilities might need some extra support or flexibility in the work environment, the benefits for these people, for employers, and for society as a whole far outweigh any efforts, costs or flexibility required.

If it is done the right way with the right support from the Government and from employers, we will all reap the rewards.