A Business Consideration: are people with disabilities a market or an obligation?
By Andrew J. Imparato, AAPD President and CEO
[Note: These remarks were made in response to the January 2002 meeting of leaders of disability and business arenas and government officials, which Imparato attended . Convened by the Bush Administration, the meeting focused on ways to promote collaboration among these three entities to increase access and opportunities for customers and employees with disabilities.]
If people with disabilities, our family members, and supporters are viewed by the business community as a market, then businesses have a bottomline reason to want to understand and meet our needs.
Designing products that work for people with a wide range of abilities, hiring employees with insights into our community based on their personal experiences, improving the accessibility of places of business, and using marketing strategies and messages that resonate with us all become savvy ways for businesses to increase their market share.
On the other hand, if the [U.S.'s] more than 56 million children and adults with disabilities, our families and supporters are viewed as an obligation, then compliance with the spirit and letter of the ADA becomes a concern for lawyers, architects, and human resources professionals.
The problem with this scenario is that businesses don't have the same incentive to compete with one another to cultivate this market, and managers don't have the same bottomline motivation to make sure that accessibility and equal opportunity become a core part of a company's culture.
With a decade of experience with the ADA under our belts, I think it is past time for businesses and covered entities to recognize the bottomline benefits of wooing customers and employees with disabilities. For all of us who support the ADA, we need to help with this process by emphasizing the business case for cultivating a market that spends in excess of $250 billion a year, according to Advertising Age.
By bringing together disability and business leaders, [Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights] Ralph Boyd demonstrated the value of adopting a creative approach to enhancing the impact of ADA on the daily lives of people with disabilities and our families and friends. I encourage AAPD's members and allies around the country to convene similar meetings and seek out collaborative strategies to improve access and opportunities for customers and employees with disabilities.
As our relationships with local businesses develop and mature, our colleagues in the business community will come to recognize the size and scope of our community as a market. Over time, this will mean greater access, more and better jobs, and more visibility for the disability community as an engine of commerce.
[AAPD is the largest cross-disability organization in the U.S. It works to ensure economic and political empowerment of all people with disabilities and to further the productivity, independence, full citizenship, and total integration of people with disabilities into all aspects of society. More information about AAPD is available at its Web site, www.aapd.org
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