October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month in Canada. There is plenty of research to show that hiring a diverse workforce with people of all abilities leads to increased innovation, productivity, meeting and exceeding financial targets, and reduced turnover.
In a recent article, Stephanie Cadieux, Canada’s Chief Accessibility Officer says, “The reality is, people with disabilities are the largest untapped resource for talent in our country and around the world. People with disabilities are underemployed compared to the rest of the population, she said. We know that right now, about 645,000 people in Canada are waiting on the sidelines, wanting to work – and almost half of them have a post-secondary education.”
Nova Scotia passed accessibility legislation in 2017 and has a goal to be accessible by 2030. What does this mean for employers? While accessible employer standards are still in development, employers can and should take a proactive approach to accessibility.
Cadieux breaks down what it takes to hire someone with a disability. “It’s really not that difficult. You just have to ask the employee what they need to be successful in the job,” she said, adding it could be a laptop versus a desktop computer that is required, or a different mouse, or an ergonomic chair. “It just takes having that conversation and being open to it.”
Eliminating barriers for an individual upon request (accommodation) is an important part of fulfilling employer’s duty to accommodate and ensuring access for people with disabilities. It’s important to follow the policies at your organization to ensure that requests for disability-related accommodations are responded to appropriately. It’s also important to understand that the process of providing accommodations is a reactive approach.
To create inclusion and accessibility for everyone is the ultimate goal. Proactive approaches include universal design, accessible policies, and practices, and embedding accessibility considerations into projects and programs from the onset. These approaches work together with reactive ones like accommodation to create greater inclusion and equity for all.
Accessibility is often presented as added steps you need to remove barriers for people with disabilities. Accessibility exists when our environments, services, products, and policies are proactively designed and constructed so that people with disabilities can fully and equally participate without experiencing barriers. It may be helpful to think about accessibility as a continuum:
Accessibility ensures people with disabilities are not excluded from experiences, benefits, opportunities, and choices in life. An example of accessibility would be including alternative text when using images, so that screen reader users do not miss necessary information or ensuring that events include ASL interpretation and captioning.
Accessibility Continuum
Employers have a duty to accommodate, which means providing accommodations when required. But the more you practice proactive accessibility and accessible design, the fewer on-demand accommodations you will have to make.
Proactively, we can:
- Embed accessibility considerations from the start
- Proactively address barriers
- Ensure representation: nothing about us, without us!
Reactively, we can:
- Address barriers as they arise
- Provide appropriate accommodation, as requested
