Challenging Accessibility Myths and Creating Inclusive Workplaces

Is your organisation truly accessible – or just meeting the bare minimum?

In this episode of the Inclusive Growth Podcast, Toby Mildon has a compelling conversation featuring Luis Canto E Castro, a disability inclusion and accessibility consultant and new Associate at Mildon. Luis shares his journey from South Africa to the UK, the personal and professional experiences that shaped his advocacy, and the non-traditional recruitment story that brought him into Toby’s network.

Key takeaways:

• Why accessibility must go beyond compliance
• Digital exclusion in recruitment – and how to fix it
• The difference between the medical and social models of disability
• How to lead authentically on disability inclusion
• Practical advice to improve your organisation’s accessibility

Tune in to discover how Luis is redefining what it means to create equitable spaces and why investing in inclusion is more than just good intentions.

If you're enjoying this episode and looking to boost equity, inclusion, and diversity in your organisation, my team and I are here to help. Our team specialises in crafting data-driven strategies, developing inclusive leaders, designing fair recruitment processes, and enhancing disability confidence. With a blend of professional expertise and lived experience, we're ready to support you on your journey. Reach out to us through our website. 

If you want to build a more inclusive workplace that you can be proud of please visit our website to learn more.

Transcript

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Inclusive Growth Show with Toby Mildon, future-proofing your business by creating a diverse workplace.

Toby Mildon: Hey there, thank you ever so much for tuning into this episode of the Inclusive Growth Podcast. I'm Toby Mildon, and this episode is different to what we normally do, because I'm starting a new series of interviews where I'm gonna sit down and have a conversation with a bunch of new associates who have joined my team recently. So this is the first interview in a series of interviews. And today we are joined by Luis Canto E Castro. And we're just gonna understand a bit more about who he is, the inclusion work that he does, what he does outside of work. And then we've got some rapid quick fire questions that we're gonna ask him, which you might find interesting. So Luis, thanks for joining me today. It's lovely to see you.

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: Thank you. It's awesome to be here.

Toby Mildon: So Luis, can you just let us know a bit more about who you are, and what you do for us here at Mildon? 

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: Sure. So I guess I'm in a bit of a new space right now since leaving the Mildon team, but I'm a disability inclusion and accessibility consultant. So I help organizations really pull the right levers to include the disabled community more effectively in their workforce, but also think about how they experience the physical environment in a workplace, making sure that's pushing designers and employers to go a little bit more beyond the basic minimum standard of what the setup looks like, because the legislation is quite far behind and needs to be challenged. But also, when we talk about accessibility, people forget that there's also the digital space that has to be addressed and it can quite often be a huge barrier for new job seekers wanting to work for organizations and not being able to actually go through the recruitment process because of an inaccessible website. So I do a little bit of that work too in terms of user testing and being in some partners to help audit those spaces as well.

Toby Mildon: We've got quite a good story about how we first met. It followed a, I would say, a not particularly standard recruitment process. Could you explain to the person listening to us right now about how we initially met a few years ago? 

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: Sure. It is a great story. So I had the amazing opportunity of being on an episode of Dragons' Den with one of my previous employers, and Toby had the opportunity to see me on screen at home and was very curious, I guess, weren't you? About who I was since we have the exact same disability. And I guess you kind of, well, it's admitted, but semi-stalked me on LinkedIn and sent me a DM. We set up a conversation and I think after the second online conversation we had, I was a Northern employee, which was very different to the previous routes I had to take to work for an organization.

Toby Mildon: Yeah, I like the story because it goes to show that you can find people through non-standard talent attraction routes. And the timing was perfect, 'cause I remember it vividly. I literally went into my living room and Dragons' Den was just playing on the TV in the background. It was halfway through the TV show as well. I wasn't watching the TV show properly. And then I spotted you and I instantly wondered whether you had the same disability as me, because there are certain characteristics that people with spinal muscular atrophy have. And then, yeah, as you said, I reached out on LinkedIn. I would say, I didn't semi-stalk you. I think it was like full-on stalking, actually. I think that's safe to say.

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: Finally, an admittance. Finally.

Toby Mildon: So what got you into inclusion work in the first place? 

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: I think this is a double-barreled question, Toby. I think growing up in South Africa, in a world where disability is not recognized the way it is in some other parts of the world, the experiences of battling inaccessible public infrastructure, attitudinal barriers in the workplace, and also the built environment that never really made accessibility a prerequisite of a workplace. So really prompted me to want to be on the front lines and advocate for the disabled community, but also find ways to change the way people perceived and thought of disability. And I guess coming to the UK five years ago, that was drastically accelerated because of the nature of disability being an agenda item, public infrastructure being mostly accessible, and also organizations wanting to employ people like me. But I think the firecracker or the timber to the fire that I have right now, I would say was joining Mildon, being in an environment where I was encouraged to challenge people's perception of disability and having opportunities to work with organizations that I guess I'm really wanting to make a difference in this space, but others who are curious of how they could start their journey. So I think those two elements combined have made me into the advocate and consultant that I am today.

Toby Mildon: What does a typical day look like for you? What do you get up to? 

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: There's always the usual standard disability routine. So wake up and have your personal care from your carers, and then doing your medications and all of that jazz. And typically that takes around about an hour, hour and a half, depending on the day. I need to have breakfast because I think breakfast is a really important meal, especially for people with disabilities. That's debatable, I guess with others, but that's really what I believe. I also have my statutory cup of mushroom drink. I can't remember, made by Space Tea. I can't remember the name of it right now, but it's a natural drink that really I feel has helped me with clarity, especially in the mornings. It's chocolate flavored, it's vegan friendly, and just something that I've now built into my family routine. And no, I'm not sponsored by Space Tea. But I guess the rest of my days is trying to find opportunities where I can do what I do best. So being around people and advocating on the front lines, but also sharing my lived experience and insights and expertise so that managers and business leaders can excel at supporting people like you and I, and others from the disabled community.

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: I have a dog that runs around the house and demands attention every now and then. And I try my best to fit in some Audible books because I'm not able to physically read a book in my hand. So I prefer Audible. So I try and do that. And other times when I have downtime, I'm a gamer and I try to play as much games as possible, especially now that I have an amazing adaptive controller that was set up by a charity called SpecialEffect. And I can now play games using my mouse, pressing on buttons and using a joystick type device, which has opened up a whole new world of gaming that I really missed from my teen years when I was able to hold a controller that I can no longer do. So yeah, that's a typical day.

Toby Mildon: What kind of games do you enjoy playing? What are you playing at the moment? 

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: The obvious big titles like Baldur's Gate 3, which is a turn-based story type of action game in the fantasy world where you're this character who has to follow a storyline and upgrade yourself and your equipment and your posse that you have along with you. It's actually won some award for being one of the best games of the year in terms of diversity of the content as well. So some of the characters or actually all of the characters that you can play with have the ability to change your sexual orientation within the game. So you can fall in love with a character who's of the same sex as you. You can wear any item of clothing. So if you wanna put your character in a dress, you can. It's a really, really versatile game that I guess allows you to forget about reality for a while. So I've put in 561 hours into the game so far, which is going near some of the bigger people. Like my partner's sister's got 2,000 hours in the game already, just because you can play differently every time you play and the choices you make will impact the outcome of your story.

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: It's a really versatile game. But since getting the controller, I'm playing a game called Dredge, which is less of a thinking game. It's more you on a tugboat around the seas, avoiding sea creatures and fishing and picking up equipment from the bottom of the ocean to fulfill your missions. So I'm kind of hopping between those two at the moment.

Toby Mildon: They sound really cool. I'll have to look up special effects 'cause I find it quite hard to use a controller. So I'll have a look at them.

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: Yeah, they're amazing, Toby. They're phenomenal. And they'll come to you at your home, which is even better. To answer your question properly, usually pre this controller, I would be playing strategy games because I'm a strategist as per my GC index score. But also because it gives me the time to think and plan and act, where some of the other games like your first person shooters are more, react in the moment. And that's really hard to do when you're trying to learn a new adaptive controller and a mouse.

Toby Mildon: Cool. Excellent. I just wanna pick up on that. You just mentioned the GC index. I just wanna make it clear that, the GC index is a tool that we use quite often here at Mildon. And it's a way of measuring your energy for making an impact. So basically, you take a 10 to 15 minute online assessment and you come back with a profile, and your profile tells you whether you're one of five profiles. So strategist, game changer, implementer, polisher, and playmaker. And it determines how you're energized for making an impact. So it's not about personality. And Luis there mentioned about strategist. So what that means is that Luis gets energized by making sense of ideas, really is focused on why we should do something, and how it should be rolled out. And that's the strategist energy. Whereas I'm a polisher energy. So I like to make things as good as they can be. I'm really energized by things like continuous improvement, setting high standards, which I'm a 10 out of 10 polisher.

Toby Mildon: That can actually be a bit of a downfall 'cause it means I set very high expectations for myself and team members, which can be a bit of a pain in the ass. So if you were wondering what the GC index was all about, then that's what Luis was referring to there. Luis, let's move on to more about your inclusion work. What do you think is an inclusion myth that you often challenge? 

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: Well, that's a very big question, Toby. I think there is the misconception that disabled people can't contribute to society as well or as effectively as the average person. And I find that I'm challenging that more than I should be considering we're in 2025. I think it's that debate between, are they seeing disability from the social model or the medical model of disability, and the fact that society has put up the barriers that disabled people face and not their disabilities. But I think also, is that recently a lot of the work that I've been doing is challenging people on the basic minimum standard. They feel like because they've met the basic minimum standard of design of their spaces that they are doing enough. And the truth is that those design standards are so out of date that they're not fit for purpose, actually, because they were actually designed for manual wheelchair users and not for individuals like you and I who are power wheelchair users. So I do a lot of challenging in that space and around policies. People design policies and forget to check it for their own biases and tend to miss things. So that's typically some of the things that I'm challenging on a regular basis.

Toby Mildon: And what do you wish workplace leaders would say and mean? 

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: I think when they make a commitment to disability inclusion, is that they actually mean it, that they wouldn't just say it as a tick box or because they know it's the right thing to do. Yes, it is the right thing to do, but it takes a strong commitment from leadership, because quite often they're going to have to invest money into it, they're going to have to invest time into it, because if they don't role model that behavior properly, the rest of the people below them are gonna do exactly as what they are, and then the bowels there will never shift.

Toby Mildon: Absolutely, yeah. So how do you define inclusion? 'Cause inclusion can mean lots of different things to different people. What's your personal perspective on this? 

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: For me, I think it's making sure that everyone has a seat at the table, and I mean that across all tables, not just certain levels within the organization. It means that anyone can participate in the workplace and in society without being segregated or perceived a certain way. We are just people like anyone else and we want to be treated like people. And if that doesn't happen, then we're not being included. So for me, it's all about, are we creating those equitable experiences and opportunities for people to shine and thrive in any format? So whether that's in society or in the workplace, I think that's what we should be striving for.

Toby Mildon: And you know the work you do around disability inclusion in particular, have you got like a practical tip to build more inclusion that the person listening to us right now could sort of take away and do quite quickly? 

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: Yeah, absolutely. So my first suggestion would be, if you have anyone within the disability community within your organization, is you need to be engaging with them to understand what their experiences are like, and maybe identify your gaps really quickly. But if not, and you don't really know where to start, is you would be, my suggestion would be to engage with organizations like Mildon, with Tony and myself, where we can be that strategic voice in the room and help you identify those focus areas to implement change or at least make a start to committing to change.

Toby Mildon: Yeah, I like how one of my clients put it, they said I'm a critical friend and I was like, yes, I'm friendly and I can be critical.

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: Yes, absolutely. I think that's a great way to just summarize that.

Toby Mildon: And would you mind just giving us an overview of the types of workshops that you deliver for us? 

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: Absolutely. So I think there is the awareness piece. So talking about what disability is, what are some of the things that the average person needs to understand about disability. So we address the difference between the social model and the medical model of disability and why the social is more important, but also talking about some of the frameworks that are available to people and why they can be effective for organizations as long as they are being leveraged in the right way. 'Cause that's the key there is are they leveraging it the right way? And then some of the other work is working with leaders, helping to build their confidence around disability and making sure that they can lead as passionately for their disabled employees as they do for their other employees, and helping them build tools and mechanisms to make them more effective leaders and minimize that gap between experiences.

Toby Mildon: So working in EDI can be really draining. You need quite a lot of resilience. It can be quite tiring work. So what do you do to take care of yourself and your well-being when things get tough and difficult? 

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: So you're right. This is a difficult space to be in. And I think I'm very privileged because I have your associates network where I can meet up with people who are like-minded and are facing similar challenges yet wanting to achieve the same thing. So that helps me a lot. I try to associate with people who are very value-driven and have similar values to me. So that always refills my tank as well. But when I'm at home, for me, it's about spending time with the family, spending time with Willow the dog, and wherever possible, just staying away from work and distracting myself. So that's where the gaming comes in. But I'm also very lucky 'cause recently I realized that there's a local pub literally a five-minute walk around the corner. And when I feel like I'm all over the place and I'm drained and I need some social juice, I'll walk to the pub, have a pint of beer, have a chat with some of the locals, and then come home and I'm energized again and can carry on.

Toby Mildon: And what's bringing you joy at the moment? 

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: That's a really big question, Toby. I think having the courage to lead into opening my own consultancy after working with you, and wanting to do that for myself has been really empowering. I obviously learned so much working with you and Brooklyn and Germany that I didn't really want to go and work for another employer. I wanted to take my claim and do it my way, which is something I'm working on right now. I'm getting a lot of joy over frameworks that I'm trying to develop. I'm not gonna say more than that 'cause it's still being refined, but I'm hoping to launch that very soon. And I think seeing the journey I've been on in the last six or seven months has really made me understand the value that I can bring to the world and to the world of work and being able to live and breathe that every day is a privilege that I'm very grateful for.

Toby Mildon: So let's just move on to the final bit. I've got some quick fire questions for you. What is a book that you think the person listening to us right now should read? 

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: Something that really epitomizes my personality is the courage to be disliked, just because I think as a society, we tend to shy away from who we are authentically, and that's not always a good thing. So that's really helped me lean into my brain and my personality.

Toby Mildon: And who is somebody that's really influenced you? 

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: Gosh, Toby, that's such a big question. There are so many people, Toby. I think I'm very inspired by my own community, the spinal muscular atrophy community here in the UK, just because a lot of us are trailblazers and wanting to help shift the dial for not just our own community, but to the SMA community. So people like yourself, Martyn Sibley, Ross Covey, they just really, really fill my fire to do more and be more.

Toby Mildon: And what is one skill that you're working on at the moment? 

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: To be my own boss, I think working for yourself is very different to having a boss who can tell you what to do. So I think trying to understand what I need to prioritize and what can wait is probably one of the skills I'm flexing at the moment that I need to get a lot better at.

Toby Mildon: Besides going to the pub and having a pint, what is your go-to comfort activity? 

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: Getting a tattoo, Toby. Going to the tattoo parlor and sitting there for two, three, four hours, it's so stress-relieving for me. I wish I had enough money to go there every month, because it's one of those things that just weirdly enough, it de-stress me beyond belief, even more than a massage would. So probably going to the tattoo parlor.

Toby Mildon: And then my final quick-fire question is, what is one small thing that brings you peace? 

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: Knowing that I'm helping to pave the way for the generation behind me. I think there are so many movements that have happened since the '70s for disability inclusion and being able to be part of that narrative and push for a more equitable world is something that I'm really, really happy about.

Toby Mildon: And I said that was the final question, but I do have one more question. Is there anything else that you would like to say just to kind of wrap up this conversation? 

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: I think to other people within the disabled community, if you're listening, just know that anything is possible and there are pathways to you to fulfilling your dreams. To everyone else, if you are a million or anything about what to do next for the disability agenda, please reach out to me and Toby because we definitely will have opinions on where you can start and give you a roadmap on how to achieve that as efficiently as possible.

Toby Mildon: Excellent. Luis, thanks ever so much for joining me today. It's lovely to catch up with you and I can't wait to continue working with you.

Luis%20Canto%20E Castro: Amazing. Thank you.

Toby Mildon: And thank you for tuning into this interview with Luis and myself. As Luis alluded to that earlier, if there's anything that we can do to support you on becoming more disability confident and a friendly employer for disabled employees, please do reach out to us. The best way of doing that is through our website, mildon.co.uk. You can contact us there and you can also follow Luis and myself on LinkedIn and follow our content and message us online. So thanks for tuning in. Listen out for one of our regular podcast interviews that will be coming up very soon, but also, listen out for another interview with another associate who's joined the team very shortly. Until then, take good care of yourself. Thanks very much. Bye-bye.

Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to The Inclusive Growth Show. For further information and resources from Toby and his team, head on over to our website @mildon.co.uk.