by Lynne Koral
I completed a doctoral dissertation July 26, 2023. In doctoral studies, topics must be original and not have been studied before in the same way or the same population. I chose to conduct my study on blind college-educated women and their experiences of employment. There had not been studies of blind women of any gender or race, nor blind women in particular.
There were many take-aways from the study that will make a difference to stakeholders such as rehabilitation agencies, employers, legislators, and the blind women themselves. I did not know that job developers were being contracted with for services that had previously been given to rehabilitation counselors. They were not always following guidelines of the Rehabilitation Services Administration as codified in the Workplace Innovation and Opportunity Act (2014).
Unfortunately, according to my participants, many of these developers did not know about transportation challenges or about the unique capabilities of their clients. This meant that many of the participants did not get jobs that met their educational goals or their individual capabilities. Policies were not uniform across state lines, and funding was run through different state agencies. Some participants ended up at sheltered workshops or in positions that did not meet their educational attainment. There is also a difference with states that provide services to general rehabilitation clients rather than blind clients in separate agencies with a separate state plan. The quality of rehabilitative programs differed in each state. Rehabilitation agencies were a significant barrier for blind people because the agency decisions and policies were not uniform across state lines. State agencies did not give clients the ability to make decisions about their job positions, or explain how to look for employment. One interesting fact is that funding did not determine the quality of services, and states with separate agencies spent about twice as much on their blind clients.
The biggest challenge for women in employment that was conveyed to me was the lack of accessibility of proprietary websites at work and assessments that needed to be filled out for job placement. Job applications were a barrier as well with inaccessible websites. Many participants did not even get the computer training that met accessibility standards for the job, or they did not receive the requisite training that was necessary to conduct their specific job positions from their state agencies. There is no uniform standard for web accessibility in the job market, and very few studies have studied this aspect of job readiness even in 2023. Only about two studies even conducted research concerning the lack of website access as a barrier to employment with very few participants. Since computers are ubiquitous, it is difficult to understand why training was not uniform for all rehabilitative agencies across state lines. This aspect of readiness for employment is a fertile subject to study further.
While some studies looked at policy implications, others looked at employment from the blind person’s perspective. But again, all the research was scant. It put all disabilities together and did not separate men from women. Isolation was a frequent problem due to supervisor or coworker communication problems.
Legislation is not always understood by policymakers since their decisions are not based on having experience with blind people. Because legislation is about incremental progress, it is hard to introduce legislation that will really improve employment of blind people. Legislators should have more interaction with blind people and with rehabilitative agencies.
Employers have been studied in research, but agencies have not interacted enough or as often with employers, and they are not aware of the sorts of jobs blind people can do. Blind people and women are not given jobs that are commensurate with their educational attainment in many cases because employers and human resource managers do not know what blind people can do and what equipment will be necessary to complete job tasks.
One surprising finding was that most of the participants worked from home. Whether it was due to secondary disabilities or workplace issues with technology or transportation challenges, these participants chose to work at home or worked with their employers to work at home. This was not only due to the pandemic. This was true of many people who are not blind women, but blind women face other challenges that other able-bodied people do not face. However, working from home was not a panacea, and most blind women did not have a leadership role, so it was not available to them.
Since this is the first known dissertation on blind women with a college education and their barriers to employment, more groups must be studied to assess the computer technology and isolation that many blind people face.