As a person with a disability myself (legally blind), I have a couple of concerns with this idea.
First, the category of people with disabilities is quite broad. There are not only different categories of disability, but also a broad spectrum of severity for any given disability. Why would an employer post to a job board for people with disabilities in general, except out of a misguided sense of charity, or perhaps to meet some kind of quota?
And that brings me to the bigger concern: Why do people with disabilities need a special job board just for us anyway? Surely that is a failure to fully integrate us into mainstream society, which I think is ultimately the best thing for everyone.
By the way, though I hate the clunkiness of terminology like "people with disabilities", I think it's justified in this case. For me, the word "disabled", particularly in the context of employment, has the connotation of being unable to be productive. Some people's disabilities are severe enough that that's true of them, but that's not all of us, not by a long shot. Maybe I'm being over-sensitive about that, but I'm just telling you how I see it, for what it's worth.
> Why would an employer post to a job board for people with disabilities in general, except out of a misguided sense of charity, or perhaps to meet some kind of quota?
One of my employers purposefully went and hired a blind developer. Not because they felt charitable or because they had to fill some quota but because we needed to improve the accessibility of our web apps. But it took us nearly half a year just to find someone and then we still needed them to get through interviews. The process took over a year.
Having that developer on the team proved tremendously effective in improving the accessibility for everyone, not just the vision impaired. Depending on what you do having someone on the team that actively works on this and understands these issues at a much deeper level can bring enormous benefit. It also ensured this wasn't a one off improvement. By continuously being involved they sensitised other developers to these issues.
> One of my employers purposefully went and hired a blind developer.
That was really great of them to hire a blind developer, what makes me mildly furious is that disabled in the tech world means blind or deaf, there isn't any room for people with extreme motor skill difficulties. A few people have suggested tools in this thread and they have all been for blind people and that is what "accessibility" has come to mean the technology space at the moment. Blind people definitely need to be catered to don't get me wrong, but how do you use the Internet if you can't use your arms? It just doesn't come up in web development courses, most software products don't think about it at all, we really are the redheaded stepchildren the accessibility world.
It's only Apple in the past couple of years who came out with their suite of tools to allow quadriplegics and people with extreme motor difficulties to use iOS that have really thought about it, and they are really amazing. Full disclosure I helped beta test a couple of versions of iOS accessibility stuff, but there isn't another company in the world where you could take a laptop or phone out-of-the-box and within 5 minutes be up and running as a person with quadriplegia. And believe me I've looked!
So developers, spare a thought for those of us who had to cobble together some Frankenstein approach to using the Internet just because we cannot use our hands! :-)
Someone once mentioned the distinction isn't disabled vs abled; it is disabled vs temporarily-abled. Given enough time/age disability is inevitable.
I have always felt private gratitude for a profession where the physical requirements are one good eye and one good finger. Reading the inspiring posts above, it appears I have set my physical requirements bar too high.
You're absolutely right, old-age and infirmity will get is all in the end. It just so happens that disabled people are living in the future that the able-bodied will experience right now, the solutions we come to now and hopefully I can contribute to that will be the ones that you use when you get old.
Hey, if you have a job that suits your physical ability and you enjoy it I think you should go for full on gratitude! :-)
I don't know if vision and hearing impairments are the only ones considered in all technology but certainly in web design vision is the main one considered. If a web site has been made accessible to someone who is blind and uses a screen reader, that includes making sure it's keyboard accessible. What are some examples of a site being keyboard accessible with a screen reader but not to you with the assistive technology you use?
I think you make an excellent point in your other post, it's hard to tell when a website is keyboard accessible or not. I have no idea of the top of my head whether the New York Times, CNN or YouPorn* are navigable via the keyboard. Nobody advertises it and I didn't know that there was a crossover between screen readers and keyboard use, thanks for the info.
Personally I solved the problem, well I looked in the chrome extension store and use an extension called Vimium[1]. Without that extension I would not be able to browse the Internet as quickly as I do, you simply learn a few keyboard shortcuts and when you press say the letter F it places little yellow boxes above every link with a number in each box. You type the numbers and follow the link, I do this by speaking the numbers out loud with my voice but people do in other ways too.
One of the most useful and unintended accessibility products on the web, if this could be incorporated into every website then problem solved largely!
Thanks for the link, I like learning about solutions to accessibility problems using tools that weren't specifically designed for that purpose. I think it's actually better for each site to not try to bake this in because each one will do things differently and take some of the control out of the individual's hands. I think it's better for them to code to web standards so each individual's tools can work with them; e.g. instead of writing a <div> with a click event that opens a URL, just use <a href>. That's a somewhat contrived example but using a <div> with a click event where they should use a <button> is very common.
You use a Mac, right? Do you not use Dragon for Mac for voice dictation? They do have web extensions for Safari and Firefox (not Chrome, only Dragon NaturallySpeaking for PC has a Chrome extension).
You make some excellent points and after thinking about some more I think one of the most difficult things to do is explore a website, yes I could tab through every link when a webpage has been coded to proper standards but if there was some way for me to explore our website without having to do that, that would be awesome.
Yes, that was just one example of what it could do. The whole extension was a number of things and I was talking about the suite of tools being something that you could maybe toggle on and off in the browser. For instance pressing the letter F brings up a load of boxes with numbers in and when you type in those numbers you follow the URL, but if you press the letter C and then type a number that comes up it copies the URL of the page you are onto the clipboard. I'm not all web developer so I don't know how feasible this would be, but if I could flick on that extensions functionality in any browser that would be awesome. If you're watching Vimium person, thanks!
Yes I am on a Mac and I have tried the extensions in Dragon 5 and they are absolutely abysmal, they don't work most of the time and caused my browser to crash. In fact DragonDictate 5 was so bad that I've downgraded back to version 4, the recognition accuracy went through the floor, the ability to manipulate custom commands was changed beyond recognition to the point of uselessness, it was unstable and crashed all the time and was generally terrible. Really weird, as version 4 is a solid as a rock and has been since the day I bought it. Which is why I tried version 5 on a Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, iMac, different MacBook Pro and a number of different versions of OS X all with the same terrible result. Must've been a Friday.
To answer my own question, I just remembered two examples. First, "skip to main content" links that are always visually hidden, even when they have focus. Another is one I saw earlier this week, an accordion widget that that was totally keyboard accessible but had no visual indication of focus; fine if a screen reader is explaining everything, really hard to use if you're using your vision. I suppose a blanket issue is the lack of visual indication of focus, especially by overriding the browser's native styling of focused objects.
At a Meetup presentation last month we had someone on NPR's web team talking about a variety of things related to both usability and accessibility. One of the examples he had of a terrible accessibility item was an overlay (e.g. picture zoom, etc.) for which the "close" button was right there on screen - and at the very bottom of the page after dozens of links for a screen reader.
> That was really great of them to hire a blind developer, what makes me mildly furious is that disabled in the tech world means blind or deaf, there isn't any room for people with extreme motor skill difficulties.
Perhaps your could be of help by providing some guidance in the area? I can certainly understand the frustration but without further information on what to do, not to do, material to read up on and what not it's going to be hard to get anything done. Not everyone has Apple's resources or even their understanding of what disability means, which forms it can take and how that affects the usability of their products.
When I worked on an accessibility project, we were told that there was a pecking order to the disabilities simply based on how noisy/politically active groups were.
If I recall right, the order went: blind, low vision, deaf, motor, color blind, cognitive. I'm sure I'm forgetting a group or two, and motor had a lot of subgroups to care for.
Those groups were how we prioritized the work, the blind were always tops.
It was interesting how we classed users too in an attempt to be respectful. Blind were 'screen-reader' users. Non-disabled users were called 'sighted' users.
I wonder why that pecking order is the way it is. I'm guessing it's because, before the rise of graphical user interfaces, it was quite easy to adapt computers for blind people. Low-cost (albeit crappy) speech synthesizers were available as add-on cards not long after the beginning of personal computers, and with one of these, writin ga screen reader for a text-based environment like MS-DOS was quite straightforward. And even with the rise of MacOS classic and Windows, developing a screen reader for a GUI primarily required some clever low-level hacking to intercept calls to the OS's drawing functions (e.g. TextOut in GDI) and build a model of what's on the screen. That still seems easier than, say, implementing good speech recognition.
So is this pecking order just a consequence of which groups were able to effectively use computers and, by extension, become active online, first? Or is there more to it than that? Do we blind and low-vision people unknowingly do anything to make it worse for people with other disabilities? And can we avoid that?
> I wonder why that pecking order is the way it is.
Probably because the web is primarily visual. While there are many things on the web that are less usable if you're deaf, color blind or have motor control or cognitive issues, there are huge areas of it that are inaccessible if you're blind. If I mute my speakers or change my display to greyscale to simulate hearing or color problems I may find that Youtube is a lot less interesting, but if I turn my monitor off I'm going to have a hard time getting to Youtube in the first place.
Motor control issues are more likely to be addressable at the user's equipment than at the site level except in ways likely to overlap with visual issues (e.g. keyboard control).
You raise a lot of questions in my mind on this. My knowledge of accessible software history is spotty, especially for pre-web software. Here are some things I was taught that might be helpful:
1) There is a sizeable cohort of blind web surfers even today who operate on ancient, hand-me-down PC's with equally ancient screen readers. The side effect of this is they are stuck on crufty old Internet Explorer 7 or 8 with JAWS from the early 2000's. Web sites might kinda sorta work on these setups, but basically whenever the DOM gets modified on modern single-page webapps, these screen readers can lose the plot and stop reading altogether. WAI-ARIA isn't recognized nor supported by these rigs.
2) Screen-reader users that are skilled and savvy can crank the reading speed up on their screen readers to ludicrous speed. A well-architected page can be scanned and read to a screen-reader user at a rate comparable to a sighted user's reading rate.
The combination of these two things, I think, can make web technology tantalizingly-but-not-quite accessible for the blind. Meaning, a website can provide a passable experience or a torturous one depending on how clued-in the developers were when they built the page. A few missing alt attributes or absolutely positioned DIV's, and the page reads like nonsense, even on modern screen readers. I have personally watched a screen-reader user somehow get himself into a loop, essentially racing around the top, right, and bottom nav's of a badly designed page with their screen reader and never getting into the body of the page. I would go bonkers if I were that guy; he just wanted to pay his utility bill and he couldn't get to the crummy form that was buried somewhere in the (probably malformed) HTML on the page.
This leads me back to your questions:
> Do we blind and low-vision people unknowingly do anything to make it worse for people with other disabilities? And can we avoid that?
Worse? No, I don't think so, not in my experience at least. The various disability groups have wildly differing inherent strengths, weaknesses, and operating speeds. I think blind peoples' potential to race around a page with a screen reader and consume the data on it at a near sighted user pace simply drives them to advocate more strongly for themselves than other disabled groups. It goes even to the point that lawsuits are being filed to improve the accessibility on some public utility websites. These lawsuits were filed specifically to get the sites to be WCAG 2.0 Level AA compliance. It was very clear those lawsuits were to serve the blind plaintiffs, and my team's prime directive was to get the page to read equivalently to the screen reader users and sighted users. But, of course getting WCAG 2.0 Level AA compliance is also going to encourage us to provide for low vision, motor, and color blind users' needs as well. So, I figure everyone wins when the blind folks get their way. :)
On the other end of the navigation speed spectrum, you have low vision and motor users. You wouldn't believe how challenging it is for low vision users to fill out forms on poorly designed pages. Often they have to have magnification cranked so high that only a couple letters in a word are visible on the screen. For them to even find form fields on a badly laid-out form takes a heroic effort. I'm not a fan of right nav's for this reason; it's sometimes incredibly painful for a low vision user to discover that controls or (worse yet) an HTML form needed to get work done is a million miles over to the right hand side of the page.
I have heard that low vision users can will go through the torture of filling out a form, finally locate the submit button, click it, and then learn that their session timed out because they spent too much time on that page between clicks! There are websites with 30 minute session cookie timeouts that had to be cranked to an hour so that these users wouldn't suffer timeouts. And Lord help them if they mistyped anything or had some other form error - then they have to do the painstaking search for red text or error messages to find out what their problem was. PAIN!!
You might think that a low vision user could just tab around between links and fields, but that doesn't work as they get hopelessly lost. For them to navigate a page, they literally must scan by scrolling around their pinhole of a viewport and build up a mental model of where things are at. My personal design theory is that forms should be laid out along a single "axis" running the length of the page that is easy for the low vision user to stumble across and "ride" up and down as they build their mental map of the page.
Of course, savvy low vision users can combine magnification with a screen reader, and those users do just fine. Screen reader gives them text and forms and magnifiers let them hunt down and ogle the pictures.
I'm totally with you, there just isn't a way for your average developer to access information about quadriplegics and how they might go about using the Internet. The infrastructure just isn't there and I think until it is we are reliant upon personal relationships, by that I mean "I worked with this quadriplegic guy once who was a geek and he gave me some useful feedback on what we were doing". Sadly that really is the state of affairs at the moment as I see it. Coincidently it was word-of-mouth that got me involved in the Apple beta test program, so even they are relying on a word-of-mouth network to a point.
Now I understand that the quadriplegic/geek crossover may be a small one but we are large enough market to be worth catering to, as we also have money that we are willing to exchange for goods and services. :-)
However there is just no way for me to give large companies advice, or even small ones for that matter. Everybody makes sure their website or product works with a screen reader and out the door it goes, why would you think about motor skills if you've never had to before and you don't know anybody who is quadriplegic and you've got so much else to do and your boss is on at you to do some testing about something else and on and on it goes. I can totally understand why the development hasn't been done, I really can.
Maybe someone wants to fund me to start up a quadriplegic Internet Users Information Widget Forum Type Thing™. You give me huge amounts of venture capital and I'll tell you my opinion on all things Internet, that sounds like a great swap! :-)
In all seriousness the one piece of advice I would give you is to sit in front of your product whatever that might be, put your hands under your thighs and think to yourself "how am I going to accomplish this task?". Because over the past decade that's when I've had to do with each new piece of technology, and if you have another idea about how I can interact with companies please do let me know.
> Everybody makes sure their website or product works with a screen reader and out the door it goes
I don't think even a majority do anything to test or ensure their website or software works with a screen reader or other assistive technologies.
I think it can be useful to think of accessibility as an aspect of usability. To that end, user testing, which involves people who aren't necessarily technically knowledgable or "geeks," should include people with disabilities, particularly those who use assistive technologies (AT).
I mainly think about web accessibility which doesn't pose some of the challenges that hardware products have. With web sites, someone can pay you for an hour of two of your time to get on Skype (or whatever), share your screen, they give you a URL to visit, and ask you to perform some tasks. They watch to see what fails and listen to you talk about your thought processes regarding how you go about performing a task or when you think you've run into an obstacle that may or may not be AT-related. This kind of remote user testing has many advantages unrelated to accessibility but especially for testing with AT it means not having the expense, expertise, and logistics of having a facility that's easy to get to and equipped with many different kinds of AT.
I would happily take part in that kind of testing for pretty much any kind of product, the more I can do to make the world and accessible place the better.
If anybody needs that kind of service drop me a line, I'd be happy to get involved. Probably don't want to get involved in nuclear weapons research, but beyond that we are cool. :-)
I would love to know how page navigation should be optimized for a quadriplegic.
Frankly, voice command seems to me like the ideal future web for extreme motor disabilities where the user can see and speak. Should website functionalities be exposed as Alexa Skills on Amazon's Echo product? Perhaps an Alexa two-way tie-in to the page you're currently viewing? Maybe metadata on that page could inform the Alexa Skill what controls are interactive on the page?
Perhaps you should reach out to Amazon; their device feels a bit like a solution looking for a hard problem at this point.
Do you use a screenreader? I was looking at the Find Jobs page, which appears to trigger the search on any "on blur" event in the form, and thinking that this is a good case for using ARIA live regions [0]. I was also thinking that it would be better if it took a progressive enhancement approach and had a working Submit button to POST the form when JavaScript is not running but that's another matter.
Interesting perspective on the terms (in your last paragraph). I've long thought it's odd how this language has changed over the years. A long time ago a disabled person might have been called "retarded" -- that's probably the most offensive term of all now, but the literal meaning of the word itself is least offensive, simply meaning "slowed down". Then came "handicapped", which isn't used much anymore, but literally just means having some kind of restriction. Now we are much more enlightened and say "disabled" -- it's the least offensive term now, but if you take it literally that word is quite horrible, meaning "not working" or "incapacitated" or "turned off" or "unable to be used", as in "the bomb squad disabled the bomb". Why did we settle on a word that means "not working" for someone who has a handicap?
Couldn't agree more, and don't even get me started on "differently abled".Facepalm
It's a weird one and I really do think a lot of the time it depends on who's saying it and in what context, I think when there is a large power imbalance than the use of the word disabled can be really horrible but between peers, not so much.
Personally I prefer being called Stuart, possibly "you know, you've met him before, he's the one in the wheelchair", that sort of thing. I don't think there is one right answer because you obviously can't please everyone all the time, but I do think that large institutions and those with power have to be very careful about how they phrase things because you will come off as dismissive if you're not careful. Even if you don't need to be.
I read GP's last paragraph as distinguishing between the use of "disabled people" vs. "people with disabilities," rather than between the use of "disabled" (or words with the same root) vs. other words.
My company did some work for an organization that supported people with disabilities in the workforce. The client stressed the importance of the distinction between using "people with disabilities" as opposed to "disabled people," with the former being much preferred because - due to its structure - it puts the focus (i.e. the first word) on "people" rather than "disabled/disability".
...but it also says the disability lies with that person, and this is likely to be rejected by people who prefer the social model.
When people can't read a website it's tempting to tell them to ctrl + or install user CSS. But better is to just design the site in ways that don't exclude large numbers of the population, let alone people with visual impairment. It's not that person's eyesight that excludes them, it's the designer's poor choice of font size and colour that excludes them.
There are problems with this model, but it's still mostly useful.
For me, the word "disabled" brings to mind the novel _Ender's Game_, particularly the scenes in the battle room where that word describes the kids who have been completely paralyzed for the remainder of the battle and thus can't do anything. Or, in a UI toolkit, the word "disabled" refers to a widget that can't be used in the current context and, typically, is grayed out on screen.
Maybe since the characteristic being called out is related to ability?
Of course there is a spectrum, and at some point nearly everyone is unable to do common tasks we usually take for granted. I'm amazed how quickly I forget after recovering from an injury or finding a workaround to a physical limitation.
I personally still use "handicapped", because it is most accurate; if people call me out on it and ask if I mean "disabled", I reply with "not unless he/she is completely unable to do anything."
As I participate in this thread and think more about this, I'm conflicted.
On the one hand, saying "disabled" instead of "with a disability" carries the implication that the disability makes you completely unable to do anything useful, like a disabled widget in a UI toolkit. In our language, the best way to avoid that implication, when talking about disabilities in general, is to say "with a disability" rather than "disabled".
But when talking about a specific disability, language like "people who are blind", instead of "blind people", is just too damn clunky, without accomplishing anything, at least in my mind. I know plenty of blind people, and none of us use people-first language to refer to ourselves or each other.
Why does "disabled" have the connotation of being unable to be productive, and the phrase "people with disabilities" not? Surely, if we use the phrase "people with disabilities" as we would have used "disabled", it will gain similar connotations, no?
Sorry if i come off as confrontational, I'm legitimately curious
I believe the preference is due to "disabled person" has the connotation of "a person who is disabled", where "disabled" is an essential property of the person, while "person with disabilities" has the connotation where the disability is not essential to the person's definition: it's just one aspect of the person.
I'm going to assume good faith and, in my very humble opinion, you are absolutely correct. If it's got the word disabled in it it has the same connotations.
You. Are. Broken.
Refer to all disabled people by their chosen name if you know it, otherwise ask them and then work around any logistical problems as they come up and as they are referred to you by the disabled person. Do not assume anything and do not push a wheelchair without asking and/or being asked. Even if a disabled person is lying on the ground, they will ask if they need help.
Rules to live by able-bodied people, rules to live by!
>By the way, though I hate the clunkiness of terminology like "people with disabilities", I think it's justified in this case. For me, the word "disabled", particularly in the context of employment, has the connotation of being unable to be productive. Some people's disabilities are severe enough that that's true of them, but that's not all of us, not by a long shot. Maybe I'm being over-sensitive about that, but I'm just telling you how I see it, for what it's worth.
*This is not aimed at the OP
I'm just going to go off on a tangent with you here 100%! I hate it when people say that I'm "wheelchair-bound" and I'm TOTALLY oversensitive to it, and I'm probably oversensitive to because the whole world is aggressively designed to make my life difficult. Not intentionally, there (probably) isn't some anti-disabled cabal going around making pavements uneven but when you live in a world that is hostile to you it's very easy to get sensitive to the language people use. Words have meanings. And I don't really care, I think we should band together and bann the word disabled. I think we should disable it.
By the way, the Germans have a great saying, they use "wheelchair driver". Now that I like.
how was the site usability wise for you? Looking through the code I thought it would be irritating or difficult to search?
Actually when I saw it I thought it might be useful for a project of mine where I will need to hire people to do accessibility testing, but I suppose that is about the only edge case I can think of that makes a disability job board useful. (note that by accessibility testing I would also like to test dyslexic usage, color blindness, and other disabilities rather than just blindness [ which in my experience is the disability most often tested for and then calling it a day])
Man, I'm quadriplegic and I had to set up my business as it was basically the only way I could get a job. People with severe disabilities don't tend to make the most reliable employees timekeeping wise because you just can't guarantee that you will be at a place at a given time, I cannot in any way guarantee that I will be fit for work at 9 AM on Monday morning, it's just the nature of the disability. And that's the same for most people with severe disabilities. That just won't fly with most employers. I'd be really interested where you've found a stock of sympathetic employers willing to deal with these issues, because I've not found many.
Also, why separate out disabled people from "normal" people, I'm genuinely curious? I mean I appreciate the effort of you trying to find us work, but don't you see how you are coming at it from the wrong angle. If you are going to separate out disabled people from the rest of the job market, how about a board where disabled people post their skills, the hours they can guarantee per week to work and the wage they are willing to work for just like other niche job markets? What separates out this job market from the others in the space?
Also, by disabled do you mean blind and deaf or do you mean anybody with any type of disability? The type of disability will have a huge impact on the type of job. You don't have any jobs listed so I can't get a handle on who exactly this is meant for you see.
I'm not trying to be a dick, I'm really not and I'm sure this effort comes from a good place but if you haven't got a group of employers willing to employ disabled people then you are really going to struggle. I wish you luck.
I have lots of questions, I may also have answers, hit me up if you want to chat.
> Also, why separate out disabled people from "normal" people, I'm genuinely curious?
Since, as you recognize, many employers are unprepared to even think about how a particular disability is not a barrier to a particular job or about accommodations that would enable someone to perform the job, there could be value to people with disabilities for a site where employers identify themselves as having thought about it. Many, if not most, jobs appear in more than one place so this can be another one.
Still, I'm more inclined to prefer a job board for everyone that has options like Craigslist's "ok to highlight this job opening for persons with disabilities" checkbox [0].
You're right, there could be value in a board like this.
I really do like the craigslist idea of marking a checkbox if you're willing to employ disabled people, that means that I as a quadriplegic don't need to learn a new interface or go to new website, I can just go to the same place as everyone else and just search by that criteria. That's a great idea.
Unfortunately, they don't seem to expose it as a search checkbox for the end user. You can't even use the "OK to highlight" text in the search box because while the phrase does appear in the job posting, it's one of the "notices," like "do NOT contact us with unsolicited services or offers," that appears at the bottom and is not treated as part of the body of the posting for search purposes (if you search for "OK to highlight" you may find some matches from people who just copied and pasted the contents of a previous posting into a new one so the phrase is a part of the posting body).
The highlighting is "for non-profit, community-based organizations in your area that help employers meet their needs for diversity and outreach by referring pre-screened, qualified candidates with disabilities for your job openings." Those organizations can add value by finding jobs that are a better match for people with particular disabilities, e.g. there are jobs that are vision-dependent that you could do well but would be difficult to impossible for someone who is blind.
Still, I wish Craigslist would add a checkbox to their search that anyone can use.
No, leaving the checkbox unchecked does not mean you're opposed to hiring people with disabilities. The job posting is still equally available to people with and without disabilities.
That's really inspiring that you started your own business! I would love to hear more about what you do.
I'm dealing with some personal stuff and feel like I'm in the same boat, having to start my own business to have the flexible hours that I need. Any advice you can pass along would be appreciated.
I basically do accessibility consulting, public speaking, beta testing amongst other things. I founded a not-for-profit organisation called https://robotsandcake.org/blog/ which has enabled me to fly a drone on stage at the Wired 2014 London conference from my house in the North of the UK, over the Internet using just my head and right index finger, that was cool. I've also worked with a number of universities and some very cool robotics projects, I'm open to anything that lets you play with new technology and can further the cause of bringing severely disabled people further into the world.
My partner and I have also just launched https://inventability.net/ which is a collection of all the hacks, tips and tricks that we've learnt over a decade of my being quadriplegic. Solutions that took years and thousands of pounds for us to come to, we are trying to pass along to other people with disabilities and anyone really who might find that sort of thing useful.
The public speaking is generally around the topics of accessibility, open design, open Apis and how to string together commercial solutions to solve disability problems without paying the premium the disability companies place upon disabled people. I've spoken at events like the Wired 2014 London conference, Google fire starters, a couple of UK foreign office events, great conference called Wuthering Bytes amongst others.
I got some great advice about 4 years ago just before I started all of this and it goes something like this: "say yes, show up and deliver". You're not competing against everybody in the world, you're competing against the people who said yes, showed up and actually produced something. That's basically what I've done and it's working pretty well so far!
At a certain point it matters how much you produce but as long as you produce a little as often as you can, and you have some good ideas you will probably be okay. :-)
> I'm curious about why set working hours are a problem. Would you mind going into more detail about that?
No problem. It's all about the variability of one's condition and disability, let's for instance take somebody who suffers from chronic pain, is quadriplegic, may or may not have one or 2 pressure sores on their body and may or may not be taking huge quantities of memory hindering and/or altering painkillers and other pharmaceuticals. Given all those variables, there is no way to say that I will on Monday morning not be in any pain, be able to get out of bed, and be able to focus sufficiently to do the job you've asked me to do.
Now if you tell me that I've got to accomplish 30 hours over the course of a week then that's much easier, because by Monday afternoon my head might have cleared and the pain levels have subsided somewhat so I can get on with 5 or 6 hours work.
we've started to use it on the main theme for CBP apps: https://github.com/US-CBP/cbp-theme
and it helps catch a bunch of basic issues while developing.
I would suggest changing the branding to "a simple job board for people with disabilities." For many people the disability is a part of who they are - it's not how they self identify.
On the point of "disabled people" vs "people with disabilities" I have this conversation a lot with my wife, who is an Occupational Therapist and who first introduced me to the idea of people-first language. I think there's merit in the idea, but I'm not sure it's a settled issue. She's also fluent in American Sign Language and studied Deaf culture as an anthro undergrad, and they are one of several examples of groups who diametrically oppose people-first language: Deafness is a defining and inseparable part of who they are as a person. I would love to hear the opinions of other people on this board who live with Autism, blindness, para- or quadri-plegia, or other forms of disabilities on the matter, as I don't see myself as being able to have an authoritative opinion, as someone who does not live with disability.
I'm quadriplegic and I really think it is entirely context-based. If we were to meet in a bar is my wheelchair or the fact that I'm quadriplegic relevant? Of course not. In which case you'd just call me by my name.
The only time the fact that I'm quadriplegic to should become an issue is when it alters some plan, building, or some accommodation needs to be made to factored in to allow me to participate in the world. And in which case the questions should almost always be logistical, so for me the word disabled should really never come up.
For instance if we were going to a bar we would just make sure we went to one that had level access, problem solved and you haven't had to call me anything other than my name.
I have a small break in my neck, in all other respects I'm just like you and expected to be treated as such. Sorry these aren't more string together and coherent thoughts, I'm just thinking about it the first time properly!
Edited To Add: Stupid voice dictation software making me look crazy again, can somebody please make voice recognition software 100% accurate? Thanks!
A few decades ago people would personify the word disability in Germany.
"Ein Behinderter hat dort geparkt" -> "A disabled was parking there"
But this changed drastically in my lifetime. We often just say "he is disabled" and mostly to people who are mentally challenged. For physical disabilities we often use the specific word directly.
If someone can't see or walk, we simply say it, we don't say he is disabled, it's already implied by his condition.
That's a great question, and unfortunately we've reached the point where I'm afraid I can't speak authoritatively. I did a quick search regarding cultural vs. physical deafness, here are some interesting things I found:
The reverse is also an interesting question: how does the Deaf community view people who seek to gain hearing through e.g. cochlear implants, like for a child born deaf? Answer: it's extremely controversial.
It's an very interesting subject for me because I love thinking about language and how it shapes cognition and culture–and sign language is such a different paradigm than spoken or written languages. That being said I still only have a beginner's level understanding of Deaf culture, at least w.r.t. how far a hearing person could ever get.
One of the forms mentions London, thus some UK advice.
"handicareers" seems like a play on the handicapped word. You might need to know that word is strongly rejected by large numbers of the UK population. This is possibly going to attract strongly negative attention.
You might want to link employers and potential employees to advice about Access to Work, and to best current practice about reasonable adjustments, and to advice about the Equality Act.
This exactly. This was my first clue that this person probably wasn't from the UK.
You're totally right, the word handicapped is definitely the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the name and it wasn't a nice association. But if they are not aiming at the UK market then there probably isn't a reason to change it, but if operating inside the UK then I think the name might be a real problem.
It just makes me think of "HandiCapable" which is a horrible term.
To be clear, I don't think the OP is trying to be offensive but inside the UK I think you might this kind of feedback quite a lot.
I am mentally ill and disabled because of it. When companies have a disabled plan it is for people in wheelchairs, the blibd, and the deaf but not the mentally ill.
I have good days and bad days with my mental illness and sometimes lose track of what I am doing if interrupted too much. I know I have to take interruptions from my work for help desk assistance and other things like team members.
My mental illness has some things in common with high functioning autism, and bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia and is so rare that half of 1% get it, schixoaffective disorder. Nobody seems to know how to accomodate it and nobody wants someone with it to be a 50K or 150K a year programmer with it.
If only that job board worked, i tried searching jobs and waited over an hour for it to stop the circle spinning.
I really LOVE this concept. I think it is much needed. I've seen studies of entire customer service departments staffed by disabled individuals who showed extreme patience and empathy with customers resulting in higher satisfaction.
One consideration to improve the user experience is to make sure that the website is Section 508 Compliant (www.section508.gov) so that it is easier to access for individuals with hearing and visual disabilities.
Section 508 is specifically for U.S. government work and rather outdated. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are much more useful [0] and if you meet all the success criteria for WCAG level AA, you should also meet Section 508 requirements (there may be one or two overly prescriptive details in 508 that may require tweaking to get to 100%).
I don't know if this was an official launch, but if you do have an official launch I think it'd be better to seed it by reaching out to some folks first. Even two or three postings before a launch event would have made it seem more complete.
good job, but please try to fix ssh. I tried accessing the https version of your site but it didn't work. First chrome complained it was unsafe, and later your host returned a generic page for new sites.
I am actually getting the same issue, intermittently. Is it just a traffic overload issue? Anything I can do to make this more robust? I was not getting this before sharing the site.
Look into caching so that it does not need to hit the database for everything. Been years since I used WordPress but there was something like WP Super Cache that worked OK. Your web server (e.g. Nginix) can also be configured to cache pages, and there are entire servers dedicated to caching like Varnish. Be forewarned that caching and cache invalidation can be surprisingly tricky to get perfect.
You also might just actually need a beefier server. But at the very least you should be able to serve the homepage, which doesn't change super often, to everyone.
Congrats on having a site popular enough that you get to learn about a whole new world of tools and technologies!
If it's a wordpress site, I found the best thing for me was to set up Cloudflare in front of the site, because they can cache a lot of requests.
The next best thing is making sure APC is set up on your server. I've also had success tuning settings in Apache to help with memory use, but that's a lot more time consuming.
First, the category of people with disabilities is quite broad. There are not only different categories of disability, but also a broad spectrum of severity for any given disability. Why would an employer post to a job board for people with disabilities in general, except out of a misguided sense of charity, or perhaps to meet some kind of quota?
And that brings me to the bigger concern: Why do people with disabilities need a special job board just for us anyway? Surely that is a failure to fully integrate us into mainstream society, which I think is ultimately the best thing for everyone.
By the way, though I hate the clunkiness of terminology like "people with disabilities", I think it's justified in this case. For me, the word "disabled", particularly in the context of employment, has the connotation of being unable to be productive. Some people's disabilities are severe enough that that's true of them, but that's not all of us, not by a long shot. Maybe I'm being over-sensitive about that, but I'm just telling you how I see it, for what it's worth.