What many of us need since a number of us already have the education is:

1) supported universal access to fiber/DSL broadband where we live
2) Physical support at least once a week around the home. If we are placing our limited energies on the job, we have less energy to meet daily/monthly living needs like housework, errands, grocery shopping, etc.
3) Disability awareness and advantage hiring practices that can be... more »

Software for mathematical, statistical, or scientific analysis tends to lack compliance with accessibility guidelines, thereby posing difficulties for STEM students or professionals trying to succeed in a field of interest. If federal agencies applied due diligence in Section 508 market research and communication with potential vendors, incentives would be raised to correct accessibility problems in order to sell to... more »

Most of us on this are in an organization of some size or scope, that at least marginally works with or for PWD.
Are your organization's internal and external systems accessible? If not then you need to change that NOW!
Section 508 and related laws have been on the books for years. If no federal money were spent on inaccessible software and hardware tools, then accessibility would not be the problem it is today.

Phone... more »

As someone who works in the STEM field, and with websites, I can say that many students in the STEM fields are from overseas, where English is not the first language. We need to ensure websites are translatable so that knowledge is accessible on a universal scale. (e.g. HTML lang="fr" to ensure the content is translatable into french -- see this page for more information: http://www.unimelb.edu.au/accessibility/training/language.html... more »

There are many talented PWD, educated in STEM fields, who can work, but not for eight hours at a time. Very often work is physically demanding because of attendant illnesses. If a work schedule could be adjusted, that alone would provide an environment by which a PWD could be employed.

For example, my student says that sometimes, while working, he will encounter spasms, and has to stop work. If schedules could be... more »

I am writing on behalf of one of my students with disabilities. He says that one of the barriers to getting a job is that the employers are unfamiliar with ADA requirements, and that some of the paperwork for ADA says that anyone with a disability has to have adaptive equipment to fulfill the requirement for the job. Many employers are unaware of this, do not have the paperwork, or are unwilling to provide the assistive... more »

This is an article about a startup, Ultra Testing, a software-testing firm. Some excerpts from the article:

"ULTRA Testing was founded in 2012 by a pair of former MIT roommates, Rajesh Anandan and Art Shectman. Anandan, who also works as SVP of strategic partnerships for the global charity UNICEF, has always believed that people with disabilities are likely to have hidden talents that others fail to notice.

"Even in... more »

(This may apply to other disability support services as well.)
I have classified the topic as "accessible workplace" but this applies to interpreters for education also. How can a student pass a course, when the interpreter did not communicate it all?
All too often, the interpreter just doesn't understand enough STEM to proficiently interpret the event. The interpreter's speciality is linguistics, not science. Many interpreters... more »

For many STEM careers, professional conferences and more frequent/brief meetups are an important site for training and professional/career development. (We tend to think of academia here, but it's also very big in my own field of software engineering.)

I don't have a solution exactly, but: there are lots of potential access problems (physical location, access to communication & materials for deaf and blind, I'm sure... more »

The problem is that employment full time and with benefits is hard to find in some areas. There is a preconceive that people with disabilities are not employable and government will provide for them. If a person is disabled seeking full time employment is taking a job away from non-disabled. Also the workplace accommodations are going be super expensive. In some cases this true but most it is not.

For example I... more »

I'd like to share this blog post by The Third Glance, an autistic person's experiences in academia and science. Here's a short excerpt that highlights the challenges of disclosure of disability in the workplace:

"One of the things that I’ve mentioned before, is that while I am diagnosed autistic, and being autistic impacts many parts of my life in ways that other people just don’t ever experience, I am not “out” as autistic... more »

Project SEARCH's methods could be used to include more folks in STEM jobs!