Background
Discrimination against disabled people exists in many forms. For many in the disability movement disability is structurally created by a predominantly inaccessible built environment which discriminates against people with impairments.
Discrimination exists in the labour market as much as in the built environment. According to the Shaw Trust, www.shaw-trust.org.uk, the largest UK provider of supported employment services for disabled people, nearly 1 in 5 people of working age (7 million/19%) in the UK are disabled, 50% of disabled people of working age are in work, compared with 80% of non disabled people of working age. In the UK, since the latter half of the twentieth century, successive governments have presided over an increase in the unemployed disabled population which, through initiatives including ‘New Deal for Disabled People’ (NDDP), the present government is currently attempting to reverse. Discrimination also exists, however, in the electronic environment. eGovernment has brought most public services to the web. However, disabled people can be, and often are excluded from the World Wide Web even if they own or have access to a computer. For example, all job centre plus offices are now fitted with employment search facilities which allow job seekers to access the web. However, the access interface is a touch screen which discriminates against those with visual and dexterity impairments. Hence the structural creation of disability is still present and in many cases acts against social policy goals of improving opportunities for disabled people to compete equally in employment markets. Even if accessible hardware is available, further barriers are often found as a result of inaccessible web design.
The Disability Rights Commission (DRC) report, published in April 2004, entitled “The Web: Access and Inclusion for Disabled People: A formal investigation” concluded that, “81% of websites failed to meet the most basic criteria for conformance to web accessibility guidelines.” In November 2005, the UK Presidency of the EU published a report, “eAccessibility of public sector services in the EU,“ (eGovernment Unit 2005) which concluded that only 3% of EU public sector websites passed that minimum Level A criterion. Both the EU and UK official benchmark for an accessible website is Level AA of the W3C’s WCAG – a standard requiring a fundamental shift in web-authoring techniques, compared to the relatively cosmetic improvements required by Level A.
Accessible material online, furthermore, needs to be addressed at the authorship level as well as in web design. For example, screen readers pronounce the phrase ‘AA’ as ‘aah’. A more accessible rendering of the term ‘AA’ would be ‘double A’. Clearly the issue of making the web accessible requires confronting on several levels. The principal focus of this research is web accessibility in relation to employment issues. Thus a significant aspect of the research is to determine the accessibility of employment related web sites.
National job-hunting portal Totaljobs.com offer a ‘text-only’ version of their otherwise completely inaccessible site, whilst the popular www.monster.co.uk job hunting website now offer http://www.access.monster.co.uk/, which is an ‘accessible’ (to Level A) version. But ‘text-only’ and Level A ‘accessible’ versions of websites are of little help to many disabled users. In the North West, neither www.northwestjobs.co.uk nor www.jobs-nw.co.uk seem to have made any effort at all at eAccessibility. www.nweo.jobsgopublic.com - the North Western Local Authorities Employers Organisation, claiming to be the UK's leading website for Public Sector careers, has seemingly made no effort at all at eAccessibility. Public sector employment as a proportion of total employment was 21 per cent in the North West region in June 2005, (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1292 ).
Michael Anyadike-Danes’ November 2005 report for ERINI (Economic Research Institute of Northern Ireland), entitled “Some labour market dimensions of disability in regional perspective”, finds that employment rates for disabled people in the North of England, Wales and Northern Ireland, are massively worse than in the South – some “50 percentage points adrift”.
It is quite evident, therefore, that there is discrimination against disabled people in the employment sector, that one form that this discrimination takes is in the Digital Divide created by inaccessible online resources for Jobseekers, and that the North West is a particular focus of this problem.