Bridging the Digital Divide: Ensuring Equal Internet Access for People with Disabilities”Inclusion in The Digital Age: Ensuring Internet Access for the Disabilities Community

Full internet access is vital for inclusion in the digital age and countless aspects of daily life in our digital age, especially job searching and employment. Most employment resources are now online, and most jobs require at least some computer usage and internet access. Creative Spirit’s goal is to ensure fair-wage employment for people with disabilities, which means guaranteeing equal access to online employment resources and job opportunities and full digital access. That’s why we’re so troubled by data showing that a vast portion of the disabilities community has almost no internet access. This worsens the unemployment crisis, but it also marginalizes the disabled community into what Issues.org writers Jonathan Lazar and Paul Jaeger call “second-class citizens of the information society.” And that’s not all. In 2016, a Pew Research Survey found that adults with disabilities are 20% less likely than non-disabled adults to say they subscribe to home broadband or own a computer or smartphone. The survey also found that 23% of respondents with disabilities said they never go online, compared with 8% of respondents without disabilities. Slate has suggested the disturbing possibility that “fewer disabled people have internet access than non-disabled people because they are more than twice as likely to live in poverty.” The bottom line is that for people with disabilities, restricted internet access isn’t just an inconvenience. It can be medically harmful academically, socially, professionally, and during the Covid-19 pandemic. In light of all this, the question is straightforward: what can we do to improve online accessibility for people with disabilities?