The participation of people with vision impairments in the workplace is slowly increasing throughout the world. There are two general reasons for this – first a broad move towards a rights-based approach to disability, which has brought non-discrimination clauses and employment quotas to hiring policies in several countries around the world. Second, there has been a proliferation in parts of the industrialized world of assistive technologies that allow for greater communication and access to computing and office applications to people with disabilities. These in turn have increased equity in the workplace, especially in firms that adequately account for accessibility issues. A related outcome has been a spike in the number of organizations offering technology training for persons with disabilities in the developing world. In Latin America, for instance, technology training for persons with disabilities is a major area of development spending for the international agency Organization of American States (OAS).
Continue reading Disability in the Developing World: Visibility and the Workplace
