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Xbox leader for inclusive gaming opens up about her own hidden disability
Katy Jo Wright has gotten to know the personal stories of many people with disabilities in her 24 years at Microsoft, first as a recruiter and now as the head of a global effort to make gaming more inclusive. She’s learned from gamers with limited mobility, engineers who have low vision, people who are neurodivergent and love puzzle games — and it’s helped her build more inclusive teams and products.
But the one story she has struggled to embrace is her own. She has been reluctant to widely share her experience with Lyme disease, even while encouraging people to “bring their authentic selves” to work. She didn’t categorize her bouts of crushing pain, fatigue, memory lapses and organ damage as an integral part of her identity. She didn’t think of herself as someone with a disability.
Wright has been shifting her mindset in recent years to acknowledge her disability and start sharing her story. She wants to help people with disabilities and chronic illnesses feel more connected and is speaking at this year’s Ability Summit, Microsoft’s annual public event highlighting disability inclusion and accessible technologies.
“Being open and honoring my truth helps me be in full integrity,” says Wright, senior director of Gaming For Everyone + Sustainability, Microsoft’s commitments to making Xbox gaming more inclusive, accessible, welcoming and sustainable.
“It gives people permission to not have to be 100% at the top of their game every day and to bring that human element that we’re all dealing with stuff. This just happens to be mine.”
Her complicated experience with Lyme began in 1996, when she got a tick bite at an outdoor college party in Montana. She had it removed, felt fine and forgot about it until 2017, when she was diagnosed with the bacterial, tick-borne, inflammatory disease.
By that time, she had been on a two-decade roller coaster of health conditions that came and went, including a collapsed lung, liver dysfunction, an intestinal disorder and pain so severe she often lay on the floor in tears between meetings. She was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, chronic Epstein-Barr virus and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, all likely related to Lyme.
Once a vibrant athlete who did triathlons, boxed and played soccer, she was incapacitated by exhaustion and body pain. She couldn’t recall words or names of familiar faces. She took two medical leaves. With no cure or clear path forward, she lived with anxiety and depression.
While dealing with her illness in 2015, Wright launched Gaming For Everyone, a prominent effort filled with momentum, travel and speaking engagements. She worked hard to shape inclusive work cultures and help build offerings that reduce barriers, like the Xbox Adaptive Controller and inclusivity features in Gears 5. The work often depleted her energy, and she spent weekends sleeping and recovering.
Because her symptoms were sporadic, she didn’t feel like she was a part of the community she served. She didn’t talk much about her condition beyond close friends because she didn’t want sympathy. She didn’t want to continually explain that Lyme exhaustion is not like sleep deprivation. Most of all, she was scared to acknowledge her condition and what it might mean.
“I didn’t want to accept the reality of my body,” she says, citing a Type A personality and an “Irish Taurus” stubbornness. “I was like, ‘It’s just temporary. I just need to do this treatment, and then I’m good.’”
But learning about work colleagues who decided to share about their own disabilities began to change her thinking. A respected human resources executive revealed he was living with multiple sclerosis. A brilliant product manager Wright worked with disclosed that she has a visual disability. Many of the details were new to her.
She bawled during a recent conference for people with chronic conditions, where a woman who also worked in tech spoke about her experience with lupus, an autoimmune disease with symptoms like Lyme.
“It was so profound for me, because I had this overwhelming sense of loneliness that I did not even know I had,” Wright says. “All of a sudden, I felt seen and validated, in which she was describing my experience exactly.”
