Disability Awareness/Identity

Postsecondary career centers help students create resumes, learn about the labor market, practice for interviews, and connect students with recruiters. Ultimately, their goal is to empower students to secure internships and jobs that support career goals. They also provide services to recruiters seeking candidates for open positions.

The University of Washington’s Career Center noticed that quite often recruiters ask to recruit candidates with disabilities, stating that they were seeking these candidates because:

There are a few programming languages have accessibility features built in. Examples are described below.

Individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing can benefit from personal devices such as hearing aids and cochlear implants. But these tools don’t totally resolve hearing issues. In addition, individuals who lip read may only understand 30% of what is spoken. Students who are deaf or hard of hearing may use sign language interpreters or real time captioners in class, but instructors can apply the following simple teaching techniques to make their teaching more accessible to students who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Unintended bias or unconscious bias refers to stereotypes or beliefs that affect our actions in a discriminatory manner. Most bias related to students with disabilities groups is unintentional. Stress, distraction, and other factors can make someone more likely to be biased in a given situation.

Assuming students with disabilities are less able to be successful in their education or careers is a common bias. Examples of situations resulting from such bias include:

A large portion of individuals with ASD are unemployed although many of them are capable of working. Students with ASD often find it difficult to communicate in a traditional interview format. Some companies, both in the US and abroad, have enacted programs to specifically recruit employees with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Examples of these recruitment efforts and programs include:

Video presentations need captions in order for the content to be accessible to students, employees, and other potential viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing. Captioning also benefits individuals whose first language is not the primary language used in the video, people who need to see the spelling of words used in the video, and those who wish to search through a collection of videos for specific content. An engaging way to raise awareness within an organization and to quickly caption a collection of important videos, is to host a captioning party.

Completing projects in the machine shop is a critical part of many engineering degrees, but, if not designed to be accessible, can present barriers for many individuals with disabilities, including individuals with visual impairments. There are examples of individuals with visual impairments who successfully work as machinists. Seattle Lighthouse for the Blind has been training people with visual impairments to become Boeing machinists since 1951.

Although disability, accessibility, and universal design are not taught in every engineering department, there are a variety of courses across the country that address these topics. Examples include:

In courses related to assistive technology and accessibility, engineering students often design projects for individuals with disabilities.  You can prepare your students for working with clients with disabilities by:

There are over 35 million people in the United States who have disabilities, all of whom have different needs. A lot of the assistive technology they need is either unavailable, very expensive, or requires custom modification. Many people with disabilities cannot afford custom modifications. For the past twenty years the University of Toledo has been introducing students to assistive technology through senior design projects.