Job Seekers with Disabilities – How Accessible Is Your Recruiting Technology?

Challenges for Job Seekers

The Partnership on Employment and Accessible Technology (PEAT)  survey found that 46 percent of respondents rated their last experience applying for a job online as “difficult to impossible.” Of those, 9 percent were unable to complete the application and 24 percent required assistance from the employer. Of those applicants who required assistance, 58 percent were still unable to finish the application.

• The types of disabilities, as self-reported by the respondents, were as follows:
• Cognitive and/or intellectual disabilities—29 percent.
• Deaf or hard of hearing—26 percent.
• Physical and/or motor disabilities—21 percent.
• “Other” or declined to state their disability—14 percent.
• Blind or having a visual impairment—10 percent.

“The biggest challenges I encounter when dealing with online job applications are design and development-related problems,” said Sassy Outwater, a Boston-based advocate for small business digital accessibility, who is blind.

Problems include improperly labeled links and buttons, image-based parts of the application, untagged PDF files, and edit fields without accessible character-limit instructions, such as year fields that require two characters instead of four.

Some of the common difficulties job seekers with disabilities experience are:

• Complex navigation and timeout restrictions.
• Poor screen contrast.
• Applications that relied on color, graphics or text embedded with graphics to convey directions or important information.
• Images that conveyed information, but did not have alternative text for individuals using screen readers.
• Applications that could not be navigated with keystrokes and required using a mouse.
• Videos or audio instructions that were not closed captioned.
• CAPTCHA tests—used to determine whether or not the user is human—without an audio option.
• Lack of information on how to request an accommodation.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at  How Accessible Is Your Recruiting Technology?