Less than an hour after meeting Casandra Xavier, a counselor recommended her a State House internship through the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind. For Xavier, it seemed meant to be.

Xavier had an idea she was trying to turn into law: new training to help government employees interact with people with disabilities.

“I said, ‘Oh good, get me in there,’ because I’m already trying to work on a piece of legislation, and it would be even better to be closer to the resources,” Xavier said from Rep. Dan Cullinane’s office, where she now interns. “And I did, and I didn’t second-guess it at all.”

Xavier’s by-request bill was filed in July on her behalf by Rep. Michael Moran of Brighton, whose district she lives in, and is now before the Committee on Children, Families and Persons with Disabilities. The Massachusetts Constitution grants residents the right to petition their lawmakers to file legislation, without the legislator needing to sign on as a sponsor.

The bill (H 3802) would establish “mandatory disability awareness training” for employees of the House, Senate, Massport, MBTA and “all public safety agencies,” which could be included included as part of pre-existing training sessions.

“It would be beneficial to allow those with disabilities to feel included in everything that’s happening, because the worst thing that anyone can experience is isolation,” Xavier said. “I was born with a combination of blindness and deafness, and it’s isolating.”

The training would “stress positive responses” to people with disabilities, as well as appropriate ways to interact and an understanding of different ways to “process sensory stimuli and language,” the bill said.

Any in-person trainings conducted under the terms of the bill would include a section allowing people with disabilities “to volunteer to share their experiences and provide feedback about what practices would better help them when interacting” with state employees. “The best teachers are those who are actually the living artifacts of it,” Xavier said.

Nearly 12 percent of Massachusetts residents, or 785,118 people, have disabilities, according to 2015 numbers from the Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission. Of the 393,251 people with disabilities between the ages of 18 to 64 who live in their communities, 48.7 percent have cognitive disabilities, 45.1 have ambulatory disabilities, 17.4 percent have hearing disabilities and 15.9 percent have vision disabilities.