Employment in the Digital Age for People with Impairments

ABSTRACT

No technological revolution in recorded history has resulted in a labour surplus; rather the reverse. Significantly, at the cusp of each revolution there have been gloomy forecasts and defensive strategies to preserve the status quo but these have rapidly been overtaken by events.

Each new industrial revolution requires new forms of training rather than a defensive industrial strategy but it is incorrect to say that anybody can be trained to do anything and this is precisely the problem confronting people with impairment. There are simply some things that they cannot do at all and many things that they cannot do competitively. People with impairment find themselves at an increasing disadvantage trapped between automation at the bottom of the labour market and global competition for skills at the top. A person with an impairment in a factory of a thousand is much less salient than in an SME with 10 people and this is not so much a matter of competence or prejudice but of simple risk aversion. There is hope in the long run but the obstacles are many.

Web accessibility was the right place to begin in the early 90s but it was and is the most difficult digital medium to regulate; originating in the US, WAI based itself on a rights footing which meant that everybody should have access to everything rather than concentrating on forensic objectives with proportionate social gain, but in any case most rights are in conflict with other rights and often with legal duties; WAI was also much more interested in modernist data consumption than in post-modern self-publishing. Even more fundamental was the failure to stage a rational discussion between the impairment sector and industry to stage a rational discussion about the price of accessibility.

Although people with physical and mental impairment have enjoyed an absolute advantage through digital technology, they have suffered acutely from an ever-growing comparative disadvantage. The one area of service provision for people with impairment which has proved most difficult is full-time remunerative, non-sheltered employment. And while the problems for hearing impaired people should not be underestimated the real problems are experienced by people with visual, physical or mental impairment. What is required to overcome problems is a proper analysis of the labour market which will allow us to see opportunities centred round routine operations that cannot be automated and occupations which require a high level of self publishing. The most extensive opportunities will be centred on creative activity which produces variants on a theme such as can be seen in popular culture.

However, the two most important components of any employment strategy in the digital era will be the establishment of SMEs run and largely staffed by people with impairment and the design of highly specified apps to enable them to process and publish at a competitive speed and it just might be that some of these SMEs develop the apps that are required. We cannot turn back the clock; we need to forget just about everything we have done so far and start again.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Accessibility

    • Accessibility theory, concepts and paradigms