With legal mandates in place globally, accessibility enforcement at workplaces is on the rise. What this means for our industry is software makers are building more accessible products and having them evaluated both by accessibility experts and real end-users before they are released in the market.
While this improved focus on accessibility is still end-user centric, another interesting trend is the increased hiring of workers with disabilities, possibly driven by labor department rules. Historically,unemployment rates for individuals with disabilities have been quite significant—about 13 percent—almost double the rate for non-disabled workers. Now, public and private sector employers that are falling short on hiring workers with disabilities are bootstrapping efforts to ramp up their numbers.
Several factors could have contributed to these numbers—misinformation about hiring employees with disabilities, inaccessible workplaces, etc. But, with increased awareness and global disability initiatives supported by legal mandates and guidelines, more organizations are making the needed changes to hire workers with disabilities.
While there are several commonly touted benefits of hiring people with disabilites, there are two significant benefits that are not so commonly discussed, especially for software makers.
The first benefit is that hiring workers with disabilities increases internal awareness and appreciation for accessibility. In other words, a coworker with disabilites makes accessibilty personal. Everyone in the organization starts thinking from an accessibility-supported engineering angle, as all internal applications must be accessible to the newly hired employees with disabilities.
Teams learn what it takes to build accessibility-supported applications from a design and engineering viewpoint, and products must be considered not only from legal standpoint but also from true end-user experience and empathy angles. Accessibility becomes an attribute that is tightly coupled with functionality, performance, security, globalization, etc. Newer assistive technologies and tools are introduced with fewer inhibitions, given that at least one team member is a real end-user who can suggest which tools and technology to invest in.
The second less-commonly discussed benefit a team member with disabilities provides the organization is in-house accessibility testing that can be leveraged across projects for evaluating its products’ design and quality. This expertise enhances end-user acceptance and legal compliance when the products are released in the market.
An organization may hire individuals specifically to do this work, or teams can bring in users with disabilities from other departments, such as HR and admin, during bug bashes to evaluate applications from an end-user perspective. In either scenario, an employee with disabilities brings immense value to an organization.
Finally, hiring practices that include candidates with disabilities makes organizations better social citizens and brings societal diversity into the workplace. When we consider the benefits as a whole, hiring professionals with disabilities is clearly advantageous for the employees—both with and without disabilities—the organization, and the end-users of the product.
