THE Accessible ASSOCIATION.

Creating an environment that welcomes people with disabilities entails acknowledging and addressing the barriers they still face.

DISABILITY IS PART OF THE HUMAN CONDITION. That's the underlying message of the Americans With Disabilities Act, signed into law 10 years ago. That message also describes what 54 million Americans--about one in five--know as part of their daily reality, according to the National Organization on Disability (NOD), Washington, D.C. And the number of people with disabilities in the United States is expected to climb, as more self-identify as having a disability, more survive accidents and illnesses that leave them impaired, and more live long enough to become limited in some functional way. In fact, many experts in the disability field draw a clear connection between aging population trends and the growing number of people with disabilities. (See "Aging Gracefully" in the August 2000 issue of ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT.)

Disability is also more visible today. Structural accommodations made during the past decade have decreased the number of physical barriers keeping disabled populations from active participation in community and social life, as well as from educational and employment opportunities. Yet, according to experts interviewed for this article, while great strides have been made regarding public accommodations and access to services and information, not much improvement has come in the number of people with disabilities employed since the act first took effect in 1992. The 2000 NOD/Harris Survey of Americans with Disabilities conducted in May and June of this year found only 32 percent of working-age people (ages 18-64) with disabilities holding part-time or full-time jobs, compared to 81 percent of working-age people without disabilities. This is slight improvement since this same survey was conducted in 1994, when 31 percent of working-age people with disabilities held jobs.

Access to employment is, many believe, the final frontier of the obstacles identified for dismantling under the law. But with the convergence of several key factors that include a continued tight labor market, the time finally appears ripe for employers to pursue this untapped source of qualified workers. Along with adaptations to the physical environment that allow many more to at least get through the front door of potential employers, technological developments are removing communication barriers and providing alternate ways to perform the essential functions of many more jobs. And from a legislative standpoint, the recent Work Incentives Improvement Act of 1999 signed last December should provide some assurance to workers with disabilities that they won't have to forfeit medical benefits once employed or lose them altogether if they later become unable to work.

Internally, however, many organizations must overcome a variety of barriers that still keep people with disabilities at arm's length from employment and participation. Included are lingering stereotypes about the kinds of work people with disabilities can do or want to do.

Access to all jobs

First, people with disabilities don't represent a homogeneous group. They cut across all lines of race, gender, and age; and their disabilities range from physical difficulties seeing, hearing, walking, or lifting to limitations in speech, cognition, and other functions of routine daily living. It's wrong to assume that all people with disabilities--even those with a similar disability--aspire to the same kind of work, says David Mank, executive director of the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community, Bloomington.

But according to Steven Eidelman, people with mental retardation and developmental disabilities traditionally were relegated to employment within the four F's: food service, filth (janitorial), factory (assembly), and flowers (horticulture). Now more are visible in clerical and office roles, in retail, and in professional vocations of every kind, says Eidelman, executive director of The Arc of the United States, Silver Spring, Maryland, a national association representing people with mental retardation and other related developmental disabilities. This broader visibility in a variety of vocational roles should continue as access to education likewise improves.

Also paving the way to new employment opportunities are incentives from major companies committed to representing a diverse workforce. The National Business and Disability Council, Albertson, New York, provides job bank and resume database services on behalf of its 150 corporate member companies seeking college graduates who are disabled. According to Executive Director Francine Tishman, NBDC's mission is to help the business community provide people with disabilities full access to employment and to the wide range of products and services they provide. Leading the way are 22 major North American businesses, including Microsoft, that compose the Able to Work consortium, an NBDC function. The goals of the consortium include bringing public attention to the availability and qualifications of people with disabilities and educating human resource professionals and managers about recruitment, hiring, and workplace accommodations.

Ultimately, making sure you have a diverse workforce is a leadership issue, believes Judith E. Heumann, assistant secretary of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) of the U.S. Department of Education. "Leaders must evaluate whether employees with disabilities are represented across the breadth of their organizations. Associations, the same as corporations, must reach out and identify people," says Heumann. "This means letting the headhunter you use to recruit for top positions know that you are looking for a diverse work population that includes people with disabilities."

ADA-trained managers

Lack of management training about ADA-related employment concerns is another internal barrier employers face. Understandably, disability training is often more difficult to address since it may involve psychological, emotional, and behavioral disorders as well as physical or mental disabilities, says Alan Weitz, a shareholder in the Washington, D.C., law firm of Greenstein DeLorme & Luchs, P.C. Weitz, who served as counsel to a national task force on the Americans With Disabilities Act, says an added difficulty is that specific medical concerns surrounding certain types of disabilities often go beyond the normal skill set of many managers.

Issues of privacy likewise complicate the decision tree for managers and supervisors, says Weitz. If someone requires substantial time off as the result of an anxiety disorder, for instance, what if anything should you disclose to other employees about the reason for the additional time off being granted? How long must an employer hold a position open? "No fixed prescriptive answers exist," says Weitz. And while the general message underlying race-and gender-based diversity training has often been to treat everyone the same, in the area of disability almost the opposite is true, Weitz argues. By definition under the law, says Weitz, someone must be granted an accommodation that he or she specifically requires to do the job, which will necessarily vary from person to person.

But as employers give appropriate attention to disability training within the workplace, Weitz believes they will become better equipped to address the tough questions surrounding ADA-related concerns. He likens this to the way in which most managers and supervisors are now well equipped to deal with sexual harassment and other gender-based discriminations within the workplace because of ample focus on such issues in recent years.

Rethinking work

Shedding the mind-set that a job must be performed in a particular way is another key to creating a workplace that welcomes people with disabilities. This typically requires little more than some creative rethinking about the essential functions of the job and some common sense about alleviating the harriers that keep an employee from performing those tasks. In one example, Mank tells of a man with limited mobility hired to tear tickets at a movie theater. During peak show times, the man couldn't tear the tickets fast enough to keep a long line from forming. Once the employer realized the job required that the tickets be separated, but not necessarily torn, supplying the employee with a paper cutter allowed him to keep patrons moving even during crowded showings, says Mank.

Rethinking work includes reassessing the training needs of all individual employees. According to Eidelman, it once was standard practice to train mentally retarded workers to perform certain tasks--such as office filing or how to operate a cash register--in a sheltered workshop or other special setting and then place them in jobs requiring those skills. "We now know that's not what works best," says Eidel-man. "It's more difficult for a mentally retarded person to generalize from one situation to another," he explains. "It's much better to first place a person in a position and then train him or her for the functions specific to that job. Rather than teaching someone how to file in the abstract, train that person how to file at a particular law office using exactly that firm's system. Better than training someone to use a cash register is training him or her to use your register."

Accommodating productivity

Since business success is still the bottom line for most employers, Mank suggests thinking in terms of making worker accommodations in the interest of productivity. In the same way an employer might buy a particular accounting software package to help its finance staff increase accuracy and work flow, for instance, the same holds true for the tools and technologies an employer might purchase for an employee with a disability.

Making productivity-enhancing accommodations is getting much easier. A wide range of assistive technologies are quickly being developed that enable people with disabilities to be as efficient as anyone else. In one example, voice recognition and voice synthesis are among the computerized communication technologies making it possible for many more today to exchange thoughts and ideas, says Mank.

Katherine Seelman is director of the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, a federally funded research arm of OSERS within the U.S. Department of Education. NIDRR collaborates with the scientific and consumer communities to advance disability-related research and national policy efforts on behalf of disabled populations. According to Seelman, an increased focus in recent years on universal design--designing products and technologies that benefit multiple user groups--is helping integrate people with disabilities into the workplace in a more seamless manner. For instance, Windows offers accessibility options on its standard package that allow a person who is deaf or hard of hearing to request visual prompts or captions that explain sounds, or for those who are visually impaired to select high contrast for specialized color displays.

Other assistive technologies range from adaptable workstations, automated chairs, and desk carousels that put tools within easy reach to highly sophisticated sensory-activated controls that allow a person to open doors, turn on lights, and select computer commands using speech or eye movement, says Seelman. Likewise, scanning technologies can output text into speech, and wireless pagers for the deaf can pick up messages from a TDD machine. "The idea behind all these activities is to enhance independence by incorporating multiple ways for people to input and access information and otherwise accomplish an activity," says Seelman.

Another goal is to ensure that everyone is included. Seelman recently saw demonstrated a virtual golf technology that enables a person with quadriplegia, for example, to hit and direct the golf ball using a laptop computer and then roll to the next hole along with his or her golfing buddies who are using their clubs to hit the ball. "If you recognize that our business culture is often a golf culture, where important decisions are sometimes made on the golf course, then you have to ask how fair it is to exclude someone whose input is needed," says Seelman.

One of many NIDRR-funded initiatives helping to put assistive technology in the forefront is a comprehensive database of more than 17,000 products available in the United States (www.abledata.com). Questions do remain with regard to what constitutes accessibility for a given product and what guidelines exist for procuring these technologies, says Seelman. But she says NIDRR welcomes the opportunity to work with industry groups in informational exchanges aimed at defining, developing, and showcasing new products.

Disability in the open

Those who represent people with disabilities say that beyond hiring a person with a disability and providing him or her with the tools for doing the job, the issue of integration within the social web of the work community is critical. According to Eidelman, in the same way that children with disabilities are now being included in regular classrooms, the sheltered workshop era that previously segregated workers with disabilities by clumping them together and keeping them separate is giving way to the goal of integrating people with disabilities within the larger work community.

"One reason people drop out of college--disabled or not--has to do with their difficulty in socializing within the larger group," says Heumann. "When an individual with a disability enters higher education or the work world, one issue he or she faces is finding a comfort level with peers, and vice versa. Will he or she fit in? The issue of socialization is a very important one, and more important than we might think," argues Heumann. "And when you look at the various groups that have experienced discrimination in the workplace, including women and minorities, all have faced difficulties socializing at work or have felt marginalized or overly scrutinized on the job," says Heumann. "This is true as well for people with disabilities."

The presence of any population in more typical ways allows us all to deal with stereotypes, argues Mank. Exposure to one another is key, say disability experts. To the extent that people with disabilities are represented within an organization or society, those without disabilities can overcome fears and uncertainties about how to respond to others who may have certain physical requirements, for instance.

Heller An Shapiro is executive director of the Osteogenesis Imperfecta Foundation, Gaithersburg, Maryland. Whenever the foundation holds a convention, Shapiro trains hotel and convention center staff how to serve people who have OI, a genetic disorder that causes bones to break very easily. A person with OI may have 10 breaks or hundreds of breaks in his or her lifetime, explains Shapiro. In severe cases, a person may fracture a rib while sneezing, break a collarbone when putting the cap on a marker, or fracture a femur when stubbing a toe. As a result, one of the greatest employment concerns people with OI face is the potential of a fracture while on the job--including a break that may leave them permanently impaired, says Shapiro. "It's in the best interest of employer and employee alike to avoid the risk of fracture. The key is in how the employer is prepared to handle this concern.

For example, one accommodation Shapiro names that an employer could make for someone with OI is to make storage space available on low shelves in the employee's work space so that he or she doesn't have to risk lifting heavy materials from a high shelf or stand on a stool to reach something. And this goes for storage of necessary supplies in common areas as well, says Shapiro. Likewise, flexible work options that include telecommuting and flextime (to avoid rush-hour crowds, for instance) are already a standard for more employers who want to attract and accommodate the needs and schedules of a variety of employees.

Employer support

One more employment-related barrier is an assumption by employers that identifying, hiring, training, and accommodating employees with disabilities is too complicated to undertake. Tishman likens the employment of people with disabilities to most other business functions. "When you aren't the expert at something, you outsource it," she says. As Eidelman notes, most states have vocational rehabilitation centers, funded work incentive programs for people with disabilities, and local chapters of organizations such as his own that provide or support job training. And local chambers of commerce are frequently connected to the network of programs in their home communities. (See sidebar, "Disability Assistance," for a list of additional resources.)

The power of peer advice is always an option, too. Shapiro turned to one of ASAE's e-mail lists several years ago to ask colleagues about the kind of disability insurance policies they had in place. Her own search hadn't turned up anything that didn't bear a preexisting condition clause that would have excluded any employee who already had a disability. As a result of her peer inquiry, Shapiro proposed a self-funded policy to her board members that would cover all six of the foundation's employees for up to 12 weeks at 60 percent of salary. For the past two years, OIF has set aside approximately 1 percent of its budget to fund the benefit.

Modeling accessibility

One obvious concern for associations is how to meet the needs of members who have disabilities, whether they are attending your annual convention, purchasing your publications, serving on your board of directors, or even accessing your Web site. (See sidebar, "Web Access for All.") Still another critical area for association involvement is helping employer members address workplace accessibility, says Weitz.

First, associations can help provide model job descriptions. "Associations have often developed descriptions for purposes of compensation and classification standards," says Weitz. "They now could focus on getting members to identify essential and nonessential job functions that would provide guidelines for hiring and accommodating persons with disabilities," says Weitz.

Associations can also research what resources are available for their constituencies, suggests Weitz, both in terms of diversity training as well as recruitment and placement of employees with disabilities. Where gaps exist, associations could either develop those resources or gather them on behalf of their members. And since most associations provide ongoing education and training for members, they could lead in developing training materials and providing sessions addressing the common ADA-related concerns their members face, says Weitz.

The disability market

How to welcome people with disabilities not only as employees, but also as consumers, is a burning question for NBDC members, says Tishman. "Appealing to people with disabilities from a market standpoint isn't about retrofitting or designing a totally new product or service as much as it's about designing something from the start with accessibility for all in mind," says Tishman. "At the heart of universal access is the realization that a big-handled vegetable peeler helps a person with arthritis the same as someone whose motor skills aren't as finely tuned. You still produce the same product, but with the aim of making it usable by all," says Tishman.

Because disability cuts across all segments of the population, it's highly unlikely that your marketplace doesn't include people who are disabled, Tishman argues. The implication, she claims, is that at least part of the input you solicit as a business or as an association regarding policies and procedures and product development must come from customers and employees who are disabled. Ultimately, when respected companies lead the way in making their products accessible and in modeling hiring practices that actively recruit people with disabilities, other companies take note, believes Tishman. "Business listens to business. It's about setting an example."

Karla B. Hignite is a freelance writer and editor based in Richmond, Indiana. E-mail: [e-mail].

WEB ACCESS FOR ALL

Two years ago, David McClure, executive director of the Arlington, Virginia-based U.S. Internet Industry Association, set out to make USIIA's Web site more accessible after he got what he calls a nasty-gram. Someone had sent an e-mail expressing disbelief that USIIA could claim to represent Internet interests when its own Web site wasn't accessible to people who are blind. McClure shared the message with one of his board members who had been active with the World Wide Web Consortium. The W3C (www.w3.org), a standards-setting industry group developing common protocols for the Internet, has among other things issued a list of page-authoring guidelines as part of its Web Accessibility Initiative to help webmasters design sites accessible to people with a variety of disabilities.

The plans McClure and his board member developed for making USIIA's Web site more accessible included getting rid of most graphics and adding descriptive tags to images and links. "If you set up your site to be navigable only by images, then from the start your site is inaccessible to those who are visually disabled," says McClure. As he explains, Web design professionals must think along the lines of how closed captioning works for television, essentially providing transcripts of video and subtitles of images, which serve the deaf population as well. Even graphs and charts must be summarized and not used as a shortcut to providing text, says McClure.

Making your Web site accessible should be a priority for all associations, believes McClure. "Associations believe in building consensus and buy-in form as many as possible, so it's inconceivable to me that any association would want to exclude a significant portion of its prospective audience." The process also isn't terribly complicated, time-consuming, or expensive, claims McClure. "It took us about three weeks of easing through our content, and most changes were accomplished with minor tweaks."

In addition to W3C's Web guidelines (www.w3.org/tr/wai-webcontent), a graphical Web-based diagnostic tool known as Bobby is provided as a public service by the Center for Applied Special Technology (www.cast.org) to help you analyze the accessibility of your Web site and its compatibility with a variety of browsers.

For more information about the accessibility of Web and other media formats, contact the National Center for Accessible Media (www.wgbh.org/ncam). NCAM is a research and development facility helping to make media accessible to people with disabilities, minority-language users, and people with low literacy skills. NCAM is a project of WGBH, Boston's PBS station, which is pioneer in captioning as well as descriptive video service--supplementary narration that does for blind and visually impaired viewers what captions do for those with hearing loss.

And ASAE offers an audiotape, "Making Your Web Page Accessible to People With Disabilities" (1998, ASAE). This tape (product AMR98807H) is available for $18. Plus shipping, through the ASAE Member Service Center. Phone: [phone]; fax: [phone]; e-mail: [e-mail].

DISABILITY ASSISTANCE

Sources for disability-related information and assistance are as diverse as the topic of disability itself. Information about particular disabilities abounds from associations representing particular communities, including two mentioned in this article: The Arc of the United States (www.thearc.org) and the Osteogenesis Imperfecta Foundation (www.oif.org). Other disability-specific groups include the National Association of the Deaf (www.nad.org), National Federation of the Blind (www.nfb.org), and United Cerebral Palsy Association (www.ucpa.org). Many more exist, of course. Access Unlimited (www.accessunlimited.com), a manufacturer and distributor of adaptive transportation and mobility equipment, provides links by particular disability categories to many other groups.

National advocacy groups representing disability in general include the National Organization on Disability (www.nod.org) and the American Association of People with Disabilities (www.aapd.com).

WebABLE (www.webable.com) lists hundreds of Internet-based resources on accessibility and can help you direct your search for disability-related topics. And for insight into the disability marketplace, check out WeMedia (www.wemedia.org), which serves the disability community with e-commerce features and targeted information in areas of finance, real estate, travel, news, and education.

Goodwill Industries International (www.goodwill.org) is among the prominent national groups providing local job training and placement services for people with a range of disabilities.

The U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (www.ed.gov/offices/OSERS) supports a wide variety of disability-related programs and projects, including Disability Business Technical Assistance Centers (www.adata.org) located throughout the country that provide information, technical assistance, and ADA training. A toll-free number automatically routes callers to the closest center: 800-949-4232.

The Job Accommodation Network (janweb.icdi.wvu.edu) is a toll-free consulting service providing information about job accommodations and the employability of people with disabilities. Call 800-526-7234. JAN is a collaborative effort of the Presidents Committee on Employment of People With Disabilities (www50.pcepd.gov/pcepd), the West Virginia Rehabilitation Research and Training Center, and West Virginia University.

In addition to JAN, a number of national and statewide disability-related programs and services are affiliated with universities--which represent another good place to look for disability related information and assistance. For instance, the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community (www.iidc.indiana.edu) is affiliated with Indiana University. The Disability Statistics Center (dsc.ucsf.edu) is located at the University of California, San Francisco. And the Trace Research and Development Center (www.trace.wisc.edu), pursuing ways to make standard information technologies and telecommunications systems more accessible and usable by people with disabilities, is part of the College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin--Madison.

Within the private sector, the National Business and Disability Council (www.nbdc.org) is pushing corporate America's progress in disability hiring practices. Likewise, the Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America (www.resna.org) is among the professional societies helping industries and professions advance the marketplace interests of the disabled community.