Easter Seals, Inc, a national leader in job training, employment and assistive technology for people with disabilities, will develop a web accessibility project and job training program. The high unemployment rate among people with disabilities and the growing need for web-related job skills makes this project relevant for millions of people nationwide. Although a great deal of progress has been made to ensure that people with disabilities can visit web pages, very little effort has been invested to ensure they can create web content. In addition, if people with disabilities remain unable to develop web content, they do not have a voice on the Internet.
Easter Seals will target two populations during this project: people with disabilities who have limited use of the mouse and who desire careers that include web-authoring tasks; and employers of dedicated web-development staff and other web-content publishers. Once the content-management systems are redesigned and tested, an internship program will be conducted and supervised by Easter Seals affiliate staff for people with disabilities at five sites: Peoria, Indianapolis, Miami, Raleigh, and Salt Lake City. The internship phase of the project will include recruitment, training, supervision, and placement in permanent jobs. They will also aggressively promote the notion that access for web authors is an important workplace accommodation for employers and to the disability community through multiple media releases and conference presentations. A toolkit will be developed and broadly distributed to the employer community to highlight the importance of web-author access and strategies for recruiting and hiring people with significant disabilities.
We anticipate that the Web Author Accessibility Project will achieve the following outcomes: the electronic workplace will be made more accessible to employees with significant disabilities; involved interns with significant disabilities will be placed in jobs that include Web-content authorship; interns who successfully complete their internships will be permanently placed in jobs; and awareness that access to tools for web authoring is an important job accommodation will increase within the employer and the disability communities.
