Employment And Accessibility: Where Are We, And How Do We Move Forward?
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We discuss some of the reasons Fable has found that people with disabilities aren’t getting jobs. The reasons include poor education, inaccessible tools, and government programs that aren’t helpful. Fable believes that the solution to these problems must involve people with disabilities themselves.
Introduction
Every year around this time, Fable conducts our annual community survey. Its purpose is to help us keep our finger on the pulse of Fable’s community of people with disabilities, and on the wider assistive technology community. As May 20th is the 10th Annual Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we’d like to take this opportunity to share what we’ve learned, about an issue that is on the mind of our community, and the industry.
This year, we’d like to talk about employment. At Fable, we believe that involving people with disabilities at every stage of your product lifecycle is critical to creating accessible, inclusive products that are better for everyone. We help companies begin doing that through our platform, and the many other services that we offer. Although, while it’s important to test and research products with people with disabilities, it’s also important to employ them.
“How many talented potential employees are overlooked because of disability? How many voices go unheard because they are not represented in a company’s staff? How many opportunities go undiscovered because a company doesn’t have any of these voices speaking internally? These aren’t new questions. They are questions that the disabled community has been struggling with for years.”
In this article, we’ll go over some of the reasons that employment can be a struggle for people with disabilities, look at some current stats from Fable’s community, and explore some of the ways around these barriers.
So, let’s dive in, and examine the first employment barrier highlighted by our community.
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Education
The first well-recognized step on the pathway to a career is education. Our community survey found that only 62% of our community has any mathematics education above high school level. This compares to about 66% of the general population of the United States who has taken at least one college or university math course. The evidence shows that even in Fable’s community, who are selected for their skills in communication, technology, and accessibility testing, access to postsecondary education is still lower than it should be.
However, in the broader disability community, these rates are even lower.
“According to The US Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 16.4 percent of people with a disability had completed a bachelor’s degree. In fact, in the United States, 20 percent of people with a disability have less than a high school diploma; that percentage drops to 10 percent for those without a disability.”
The trouble with education doesn’t stop there. Almost every career, even those with no degree requirements, depend on extensive training, upskilling, and life-long learning. However, in many organizations, the internal training tools are inaccessible, the internal training has not been developed with accessibility guidelines in mind, and none of the third-party training tools used for up-skilling have been tested for accessibility during procurement.
This leads into the second major barrier that Fable’s community experiences when seeking employment.
Tools
In Fable’s community of highly skilled, well-educated people with disabilities, less than 25 percent have found any employment outside of Fable. The most often mentioned barriers relate to access to tools: either the tools the company uses are inaccessible, or the company was unwilling or unable to offer access to assistive technology tools needed to do the job. In our community’s own words:
“The last position I applied for: I asked for ZoomText on the computer I would be using at work. I was asked ‘who would pay for that.’“
“There are many ‘work from home’ opportunities, but the technology does not work with my assistive tech to allow me to take the positions.”
“Many of today’s internal work systems for many of the companies that I have applied for, are either inaccessible or no one really knows how or if the systems can be made accessible for potential employees.”
“I am currently on my third employment discrimination case. I am challenging call centres because the software infrastructure in these workplaces is inaccessible.”
There is a temptation in many companies to ensure that the customer facing websites and apps are accessible and ignore the apps that must be used by staff. When this happens, educated, qualified, skilled potential employees are left out in the cold. This means that your company loses the talent, diversity, and innovation these employees could bring to the table. If you work on accessibility at your company, take a moment to think about your internal software and processes. What can you do to open the door, even a little bit, for someone with a disability to work at your organization?
Government Programs
Many government programs, while intended to help support people with disabilities, are set up in ways that make starting a career difficult, and cause dependence on the support program, rather than helping those who want to enter the workforce.
One major flaw present in most government programs is income limits.
When asked, 22% of Fable’s community said that they had a strict limit on the amount of income that they are allowed to earn.
Depending on the state or province, consequences of earning over the income limit can include loss of healthcare, loss of other required supports (interpreters, personal support workers, etc.), complete loss of government benefits, or income reduction. For example, in the province of Ontario, Canada, once a person with a disability has earned $200, they lose $1 in benefits for every $2 they earn. This effectively means that they are now working for only 50 percent of their pay. Once someone earns enough that they are no longer receiving any money from Ontario government benefits, they then risk losing healthcare, dental, and other non-monetary benefits as well.
Programs that punish people with disabilities who work are present almost everywhere in the United States and Canada. And they can make getting and keeping part-time work anything from discouraging to impossible.
Conclusion: What can we do?
All these problems have the same cause: people with disabilities were not included in creating a system or process. When government programs to assist those with disabilities are created, people with disabilities are rarely consulted. Instead, economists, non-disabled experts, and medical professionals are typically the people advising policy makers. Similarly, tools and programs aiming to help those with disabilities in education are usually created *for* people with disabilities, rather than *by* people with disabilities. Naturally, this same problem contributes to the barriers caused by workplace tools. The voices of assistive technology users are not present in any of the meetings where design, development, or adoption of the tools is considered. No wonder they fail to be accessible or usable!
Ultimately, that’s why Fable champions inclusive design. The only way we can solve this problem is by involving the voices of people with disabilities in every part of the design and creation of our tools and processes. Increasing employment in the disability community will involve changes in approach from governments, corporations, and non-profits. But each of us has an important part to play in creating employment and inclusion for everyone. So, let’s get started.