>Los Angeles Times
>Sunday, October 25, 1998
>
>On The Job
>With Help From New Technology, More Disabled Join the Work Force
>By STUART SILVERSTEIN
>
>The long battle to expand job opportunities for people with
>disabilities may finally be paying off.
>     Some recent evidence suggests that the Americans With
>Disabilities Act, a landmark federal civil rights law passed in 1990,
>has begun chipping away at the severe problem of unemployment among
>the disabled.
>     Experts speculate that the nation's tight labor market and the
>new technology that helps disabled workers perform jobs also are
>contributing to the apparent trend.
>     Growing acceptance of the disabled in the workplace is evident at
>such companies as EarthLink Network
>Inc., a leading Internet service provider based in Pasadena.
>     Jon Irwin, EarthLink's vice president for member services and
>support, said he had concerns when a blind job candidate, David
>Redman, was recommended for a technical-support position early last
>year. Irwin said his worries stemmed from the "visual" nature of the
>job, in that technical support employees constantly need to glean
>written information off a computer screen.
>     That obstacle, however, was overcome with the use of speech
>synthesizer equipment and software that "reads" aloud the information
>displayed by the computer. Redman also sometimes uses a device that
>translates what appears on the screen into Braille impulses that he
>can feel and, thus, read.
>
>                                * * *
>
>     The result: EarthLink wound up hiring four more totally or partly
>blind workers who, like Redman, were referred by the Braille Institute
>of Los Angeles.
>     Irwin said he has found that disabled people sometimes require
>more training and work more slowly than other employees, but that
>those drawbacks can be offset by the quality of their performance.
>     "What you find are employees who probably are more focused and
>more dedicated to doing quality work," Irwin said.
>     For Redman, a 35-year-old from Azusa who lost his sight at age
>14, it's the first time in more than a decade that he has been able to
>hold a steady job. "A lot of companies are scared about how much it
>might cost them to hire someone with a disability, and they don't know
>that the person can do the job. What I think I showed EarthLink was
>that I was ready, able and willing to do the job."
>     Partly as a result of varying standards of what constitutes a
>disability, national employment studies of the disabled have sometimes
>yielded ambiguous findings.
>     But encouraging news has come from a prominent researcher in the
>field, Peter D. Blanck, director of the Law, Health Policy and
>Disability Center at the University of Iowa.
>     In a major study released this summer, researchers led by Blanck
>reported that unemployment dropped from 38% to 14% between 1990 and
>1997 among a group of 5,000 people in Oklahoma who are mentally
>retarded or have other mental impairments.
>
>                                * * *
>
>     Although government statistics on employment of the disabled are
>limited, a report released two years ago found that the percentage of
>people with severe disabilities who were working climbed from 23.3% in
>1991 to 26.1% in 1994.
>     A more downbeat finding came out of a widely noted report
>released in July by the National Organization on Disability, a
>nonprofit group in Washington. It found that only 29% of adults with
>disabilities work full or part time, down from 34% in 1986 and a far
>cry from the 79% level of employment for adults with no disabilities.
>     Still, the National Organization on Disability acknowledges that
>more people with severe disabilities were included in its most recent
>survey, a factor that could have skewed the results.
>     Blanck said the available research, taken together, shows that
>"there appears to be an upward trend, but there's a long way to go up
>the hill." Unemployment among the disabled, he said, "is a great
>social problem, however you cut it."