Assistive Technology for Equipping Staff with Disabilities
By Guest Writer Suzanne Robitaille, Founder of abledbody.com
When you’re looking to diversify your workforce, should you intuitively consider people with disabilities? In today’s global community, all signs point to yes.
Nearly one in five Americans has a disability, representing the third-largest market segment in the U.S. Providing work opportunities to people with disabilities helps you mirror your target audience and increases your opportunity to more effectively serve and expand your constituency.
Studies show that hiring this group improves your organization’s productivity and lowers turnover. And overall, consumers look positively upon organizations and businesses that employ workers with disabilities. A 2006 University of Massachusetts study reported that 87 percent of consumers surveyed were more likely to give their business to companies that hire people with disabilities.
Finding and supporting qualified workers with disabilities for your organization isn’t always an easy feat. Not everyone with a disability discloses his or her condition, partly out of fear of discrimination. For those who do disclose, it takes time to find the right opportunities and accommodations that will help them succeed in their roles.
If you’re ready to diversify your workforce with people with disabilities, you should know that technology is your best tool. People with disabilities often use assistive technology, which is any item, piece of equipment or product system that is used to increase, maintain or improve their functional capabilities, according to the Tech Act of 1998.
As today’s nonprofits are increasingly doing their outreach, fundraising and communications online, there’s a greater need for assistive 
technology that can help workers with disabilities use a computer to research, write, blog, run fundraising campaigns, moderate social networks, and more. These technologies are not difficult to find or costly to implement; most “high-tech” accommodations cost less than $500, and many are free -- thanks to the open-source movement and more mainstream companies building accessibility into their devices.
For example, people with vision impairments sometimes rely on software that “reads” computer text and elements out loud. Apple’s iPhone includes VoiceOver, a screen-reading program for the blind. For the PC, the NonVisual Desktop Access Project (NVDA) makes a free screen reader that’s available on their website, www.nvda-project.org. (One of the more popular screen readers is Freedom Scientific’s Job Access with Speech (JAWS), which costs around $900.)
What about other disabilities, like hearing, mobility and intellectual? There are plenty of assistive technologies for these groups, too.
People who are hearing-impaired or deaf rely on visual technologies, such as Instant Messaging, the Internet, mobile text messages, and e-mail -- all of which are commonly used in today’s nonprofit workplace. They utilize, when possible, amplified listening devices that can be used in a meeting or at an event. To make phone calls, a government-funded initiative called Telecommunications Relay Service lets them type or sign conversations to other deaf or hearing people, with the help of a human “assistant” on the other end of the line.
Those who have trouble with upper or lower mobility are able to operate computers using a variety of alternate input devices, or ALDs. These include joysticks, trackballs, arm and wrist supports, foot mice, and switches. There are a variety of switches on the market that come in many shapes, sizes and methods of activation to perform computer tasks when using a keyboard or mouse isn’t possible. They can be activated, for instance, by the eye, through a puff of breath, or with head movement.
People with learning or intellectual disabilities who may have trouble reading or comprehending information benefit from text-to-speech software that reads aloud documents on screen while providing features such as word prediction, highlighting, spellchecker and audible dictionaries. Another program, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, uses speech recognition to let a person dictate their words onto a computer. It’s also a great tool for those who cannot physically type.
As nonprofits, we should all learn about the tools that the disability community has been using for many years. We should find and experiment with these gadgets, and put them to good use by hiring more workers with disabilities and making our workplace truly diverse.
More resources:
- ABLEDATA is an online database of assistive technology and rehabilitative equipment.
- Job Accommodation Network is funded by The U.S. Department of Labor and offers an online database of assistive technologies for different disabilities and job functions.
This article is a guest post by Suzanne Robitaille (pictured left), founder of abledbody.com and author of The Illustrated Guide to Assistive Technology & Devices. This article was written on behalf of the Region 5 Parent Technical Assistance Center: PEAK Parent Center, Colorado's federally designated Parent Training and Information Center.
PEAK Parent Center www.peakparent.org - Summer 2011 SPEAKout Newsletter
Copyright 2011 © by PEAK Parent Center, Inc. All rights reserved. Permission to reproduce may be obtained from PEAK Parent Center.
Photo of gentleman who uses a wheelchair included under Creative Commons License by Erin Sparling.
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