So many posts, so little time this week – yet I wanted to highlight a presentation that Jay Wyant, Chief Information Accessibility Officer at Office of Enterprise Technology (OET) just shared with me…

Jay gave this presentation to the Minnesota Broadband Task Force earlier this month. I found it very enlightening and while I’ve added it to the Task Force notes, I wanted to make sure folks had an opportunity to see it.

I have always thought of the Internet as a tool that would help many people with disabilities. I think of how much easier email can be than the phone for folks with hearing loss. I think of how speak aloud software can “read” websites for folks with visual impairments.

But I hadn’t really thought about what’s happened as information on the Internet has developed – often into video. While obviously video can have closed captioning – most of it isn’t. And speak aloud software doesn’t help a site that’s created using images and other visually rich tools.

Jay’s presentation was a good reminder of how important it is to make information accessible. Also I hadn’t realized how dismal the stats were for employment and broadband use for people with disabilities. I’ll just pull out a couple of stats from the presentation:

• When the ADA was passed in 1990, 22% of people with disabilities were employed
• 22 years later, that number remains the same
• People with disabilities employed in state government decreased from 10.1% in 1999 to 4.6% in 2011

By 2009 only 41% of Americans with disabilities had adopted broadband. (39% of all non-adopters are people with disabilities.)

• Assistive technology is too expensive
• Broadband speed is insufficient [to run assistive technologies on top of other applications]

Just something to consider. It seems like there ought to be a way to get more people with disabilities using broadband – and that it might be a key to increasing employment rates. Jay just started his job as Chief Information Accessibility Officer this month – but I’m hoping that’s a good start to making more people aware of the challenge and opportunity.