By Dan Voss | Fellow
Editor’s note: This article was originally published in 2006 in the 49th Proceedings of the STC conference. The original title was “The Ethics of Special Needs: It’s a Matter of Fairness” because the name of the AccessAbility SIG at the time was the Special Needs SIG, which grew out of the original Special Needs Committee formed in 1999 by Judy Skinner. The name of the SIG has changed and the scope of the SIG has morphed into encompassing the methods, skills, tools, etc. that all technical communicators can use to create and promote accessible and inclusive products and services for all. The message of this article—fairness—has not changed and probably never will change.
“Mommy! Daddy fell off the ladder. I think he’s hurt!”
Actually, Daddy was extremely lucky that day. After taking a two-and-a-half-twist, double-somersault dive from the roof, Daddy escaped with a pair of badly sprained wrists.
So as I sit here typing this article, I am taped up on both wrists, looking very much as if I had double Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. And, yes, it hurts—though not all that much. And yes, I’ve lost a couple words a minute. But all in all, considering the things that could have happened, I am not complaining. No, that’s an understatement.… I am, in fact, deeply thankful to be sitting here typing with sore wrists.
You see, the wrists will heal. In all likelihood, the pain and the inconvenience will turn out the same way my previous encounters with disability have—temporary. Not everyone is that fortunate.
As a matter of fact, according to a survey by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR), more than 32 million Americans of working age (that’s 18.7% of the population from 15 to 64) have a disability, using the definition in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA):
1) The term disability means, with respect to an individual:
(A) a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities of such individual;
(B) a record of such an impairment; or
(C) being regarded as having such an impairment …
2) Major Life Activities, in general are
(A) In general
For purposes of paragraph (1), major life activities include, but are not limited to, caring for oneself, performing manual tasks, seeing, hearing, eating, sleeping, walking, standing, lifting, bending, speaking, breathing, learning, reading, concentrating, thinking, communicating, and working.
Under these definitions, the ADA legislation cited 43 million Americans as having disabilities (see http://dsc.ucsf.edu/pub_listing.php?pub_type=abstract). That’s pretty sobering, if you ask me.
Speaking of sobering statistics, try this one on for size: only 27.8% of working-age people with work disabilities have jobs, compared to 76.8% of those without disabilities (http://dsc.ucsf.edu/pub_listing.php?pub_type=abstract).
And the picture gets even bleaker for minorities. Asserts Jesse Jackson:
People with disabilities have always been excluded from the bounty of our nation’s resources. Minorities with disabilities, in particular, have been the most disenfranchised of the disenfranchised. It is time that we bring them into the fold as full, first-class participants in our society.
In 1995, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote that the plight of the people with disabilities reflected nothing less than a “regime of state-mandated segregation … that in its virulence and bigotry rivaled, and indeed paralleled, the worst excesses of Jim Crow”—City of Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center (American Civil Liberties Union).
Why have we failed for so long, as a society, to correct this injustice? Because it costs money. It costs more to equip public buses with wheelchair lifts, to retrofit public restrooms with accessible facilities, to purchase speech recognition software or Braille keyboards, and to install telephone devices for the deaf.
| The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 cites 43 million Americans as having disabilities. Despite the progress the ADA represents in improving equality of opportunity for those with disabilities, much remains to be done—as evidenced by the fact that only 27.8% of working-age people with work disabilities have jobs, compared to 76.8% of those without disabilities. The statistics are even bleaker for minorities. The STC Special Needs Committee was formed in May 1999 to help members with special needs achieve their potential by making available to them information about products, services, and literature that can assist them in their career activities. Three of STC’s six guiding ethical principles have high relevance to special needs: legality, professionalism, and—above all—fairness. |
The Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) was born out of a sense of our collective social responsibility to open up opportunities to those with special needs.
When he signed the ADA into law, then-President George Bush said:
ADA is powerful in its simplicity. It will ensure that people with disabilities are given the basic guarantees for which they have worked so long and so hard. Independence, freedom of choice, control of their lives, and the opportunity to blend fully and equally into the right mosaic of the American mainstream. (National Disability Policy)
“Well, what would you expect the president to say?,” I hear the cynics in the crowd cry. But even the fiercely independent American Civil Liberties Union hailed the ADA as “the most comprehensive civil rights law in a generation” (American Civil Liberties Union).
ADA was, and is, a good step in the right direction. But the still-lagging employment statistics for those with disabilities, for example, indicate that those who are abled, as a group, have a long way yet to go before re-enfranchising a large segment of the population with equal opportunity to contribute to and enjoy the bounties that Reverend Jackson refers to.
The 1997–1998 progress report on national disability policy concluded:
The rate of progress is slower and less steady than many in the community had hoped when ADA was enacted into law.… For people with disabilities truly to accomplish the vision of ADA, it is critical that the Administration work with leaders in Congress to forge a disability agenda that brings children and adults with disabilities into the mainstream of American life. (National Disability Policy)
Yes, there has been progress, but much remains to be done.
Now let’s do the math and make the segue into technical communication. Imagine that 18.7% of STC members are practicing their craft with one or more of the specific disabilities outlined above.
It was with this realization that STC formed a new committee in May 1999 called the Special Needs Committee. Its immediate charter was to help members with special needs achieve their potential by making available to them information about products, services, and literature that can assist them in their career activities. Its larger mission was to blaze a trail that we hoped would inspire other professional organizations to create similar support groups for their practitioners who have disabilities.
My focus on the committee was ethics. One of our committee’s functions was to help managers and instructors not only by providing resources to help those with special needs, but to make them aware of the legal and ethical principles which govern this area of interest.
Let’s look, briefly, at STC’s Ethical Principles (www.stc.org/about-stc/the-profession-all-about-technical-communication/ethical-principles). The six major areas are as follows: 1) legality, 2) honesty, 3) confidentiality, 4) quality, 5) fairness, and 6) professionalism. All six areas can be tied in to special needs, but the three areas with greatest relevance are legality, professionalism, and fairness—probably in increasing order of importance.
Let’s start with legality. The heart of the law for special needs is, of course, the Americans with Disabilities Act. It specifies that employers must “reasonably accommodate” employees with disabilities. But what governs reasonableness?
Say, for example, a small software development house with a staff of two documentation specialists has a job opening for a third. One of the applicants has a severe disability that would require a fairly significant capital investment in equipment to accommodate the special need and allow productive work. (Most disabilities, by the way, do not require a large investment to accommodate, and many require little if any.) In all other respects, this applicant’s qualifications are comparable to those of others seeking the position, but the others would not require special facilitation.
What’s the legal thing to do? And what’s the ethical thing to do?
As I’m sure Rosa Parks would tell you, those two things are not always one and the same.
Under the ADA guidelines, if the software house could show that the extent of the investment for special accommodation would pose an unreasonable economic hardship based on the size of the company that would cover them legally against a lawsuit based on discrimination.
But would that also cover them ethically? That’s a tough one. As is so often the case, ethical dilemmas carry us into gray areas. In this case, there is almost certainly a level of investment that would simply be unachievable; after all, the company can hardly be expected to go bankrupt in order to extend an employment opportunity to one person with a disability, thereby consigning 28 other people to the ranks of the unemployed.
On the other hand, could the company “cook the books” a little to make the economics of accommodation appear worse than they really were in order to escape the situation? Of course it could. And would that be right? Of course not.
But where, exactly, is that line? I would like to find it somewhere on the ledger, but I suspect it lives closer to the heart.
One area where STC could contribute would be to offer informed feedback to guide decisions in cases like this, researching precedent in similar cases and urging the decision-makers to be guided both by the law and by their conscience.
Next, let’s consider special needs from the standpoint of professionalism. Our ethical guidelines specify that we advance the technical communication profession through our integrity and performance.
So it is our professional duty to help those with special needs, but is that the point? No. While I don’t discourage a sense of responsibility as an initial motive for extending a helping hand, my brief tenure on the Special Needs Committee has made me realize that duty is not the right word. It is an opportunity to help those with special needs.
The point is to focus not on disabilities but on abilities. That’s what we mean by “taking the ‘dis’ out of disabilities.” That’s why our logo reads “Disabilities Don’t Stop Development.”
I have functioned on many committees in my professional career, as I’m sure most of you have, but few have matched the energy, vision, commitment, and sheer productivity of this group. And, of the dozen committee members in 2006, half have a specific disability of one kind or another: low vision, hearing, mobility, cognitive dysfunction, etc.
The last thing I want to do, by the way, is to patronize my esteemed colleagues by implying that this is due to some kind of special courage—although that is a very tempting word to use in all sincerity, given the adversity many of them have overcome—but I have come to realize that professionals with special needs do not want any medals for bravery.
They simply want to be recognized and respected as professionals.
That, indeed, is the whole point—technical communicators with special needs are professionals with an enormous amount to contribute. Employers should not hire people with disabilities as a form of charity. They shouldn’t even hire them primarily as a result of social responsibility—although there is certainly nothing wrong with that motive.
They should hire them primarily because to do so is good business.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, workers with disabilities are rated consistently as average or above average in performance, quality and quantity of work, flexibility, and attendance. (www.disabilityfunders.org/disability-stats-and-facts)
The millions of Americans with disabilities represent one of the largest, if not the largest, single pool of under-exploited talent available for the workforce!
And finally, there’s the question of fairness.
Our ethical guidelines specify: “We respect cultural variety and other aspects of diversity in our clients, employers, development teams, and audiences” (STC Ethical Principles).
Diversity, of course, is the tie to special needs. I refer not to “diversity,” the buzzword. I refer to the concept of enriching our workplace and our lives by sharing our differences and growing from then, instead of fearing those who are different and isolating ourselves with an invisible veil of prejudice.
Joan Bova, director of community resources for the Center for Independent Living in Winter Park, FL, who herself has a mobility limitation, addressed this point at a professional workshop to improve awareness of disabilities in the workplace. Bova explained how for generations well-meaning parents, hoping to protect people with disabilities from embarrassment by rebuking their children for staring at them, pointing at them, or even talking to them, inadvertently sent the message that somebody who is a little different is something to be feared, to be ignored, to be isolated (Bova, 1997). How ironic—a decent impulse led to precisely the wrong message!
And that message has, over the years, created a manifest injustice. Collectively, our society has parlayed our fear of those who are different into a paradigm of injustice that denies fellow humans equal opportunity as a result of something over which they have absolutely no control. It’s time to change that.
Another member of the Special Needs Committee and I were in attendance at a technical symposium where the speaker was railing against the inefficiencies inherent in reworking Web page designs to make sure they were readable on-screen for those with visual disabilities, in compliance with the ADA (which was de rigueur in this case, since the Web page in question was for a government-funded project).
“Accommodating this small fraction of the population means that we can’t use tables, which are one of the key devices in designing Web pages.”
My colleague and I bit our lips. Don’t jump in, we thought—the affront is not intentional. It’s simply a matter of awareness. Talk to the presenter later, offline.
But later, during the Q&As, the presenter became even more vehement: “If we didn’t have to deal with this darn ADA thing, we would have been a lot better off.”
That pushed us over the edge.
“With all due respect, while we understand the difficulties achieving full text accessibility can present for the Web page designer, has the presenter considered the difficulties a visually impaired person might experience in trying to read a page that is not designed to be accessible?”
Yeah, we put the speaker on the spot. Maybe that wasn’t very nice of us. But if it happens again, we’ll speak up again.
We probably wouldn’t have spoken up six months earlier, before our service on the Special Needs Committee opened our eyes to the gauntlet of unfair obstacles that confront so many of our fellow professionals—indeed, our fellow humans—in performing their basic responsibilities on the job, even the basic functions of life.
They don’t want special treatment—other than in the sense that they may require a technological boost or a simple hand to help them overcome their disabilities and put their abilities to use.
They want fair treatment. Equal opportunity. Professional growth. Fulfillment. Respect.
Is that too much to ask? I think not.
It’s more than a question of legality and professionalism. It’s a matter of fairness.
Dan Voss (daniel.w.voss@lmco.com) is a member of the STC Orlando–Central Florida Chapter and the Academic and AccessAbility SIGs, and an STC Fellow. He co-led the Society’s student outreach initiative from 2010–2013 (with student mentees Sarah Baca and Bethany Bowles) and remains active in educational outreach and mentoring programs. Dan is a 35-year veteran proposal writer and technical marketing/media communicator with Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control (LMMFC) in Orlando, FL, and a 20-year adjunct instructor for Webster University. Dan is a writer, communicator, author, speaker, teacher, award-winner, and, perhaps above all, a mentor. He was honored with the President’s Award at the 2013 STC Summit in Atlanta for mentoring and student outreach work.
Reference
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “Disability Rights—ACLU Position/Briefing Paper,” www.aclu.org/human-rights/disability-rights-aclu-positionbriefing-paper.
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, as amended with ADA Amendments Act of 2008, www.ada.gov/pubs/adastatute08.htm#12102.
Bova, Joan, director of community resources, Center for Independent Living, Winter Park, FL. Workshop on disabilities at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control-Orlando, 1997.
Disability and Employment (Abstract 11) January 1996 (PDF), http://dsc.ucsf.edu/pub_listing.php?pub_type=abstract.
How Many Americans Have a Disability? (Abstract 5) June 1992 (PDF), http://dsc.ucsf.edu/pub_listing.php?pub_type=abstract.
Jackson, Rev. Jesse L., speech to National Rainbow Coalition, excerpted from “Meeting the Unique Needs of Minorities with Disabilities,” www.ncd.gov/publications/1993/April261993.
National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR), NIDRR Chartbook on Disability in the U.S., www.infouse.com/disabilitydata/disability/.
National Disability Policy: A Progress Report, www.ncd.gov/progress_reports/Feb1999.
Society for Technical Communication (STC) Ethical Principles (originally “Ethical Guidelines for Technical Communication,” published in the 1999–2000 Membership Directory, p. 8.), www.stc.org/about-stc/the-profession-all-about-technical-communication/ethical-principles.
