Accessibility, Inclusion, and the Future of Learning and Work Speakers: Jutta Treviranus, Deborah Stienstra, and Dr. Mahadeo A. Sukhai Moderator: Michelle Fach Michelle Fach: Good afternoon, everyone. I am thrilled to be here today. My name is Michelle Fach and I am the Executive Director of Open Learning and Educational Support. And on behalf of myself, the university and Athol Gow, who is the co-chair of the conference committee as well as the Manager of Accessibility Services at the University of Guelph library. We would like to welcome you to the day one virtual Accessibility Conference closing panel discussion. I know that we're all very excited to be part of this. This session features three distinguished academics and researchers who will be speaking to the conference theme of Accessibility, Inclusion and the Future of Learning and Work from their respective areas of disciplinary expertise and interest. Each panelist will have a chance to speak for 10 minutes. Once all of the panelists have spoken, there will be an opportunity for you, the participants, to address the panelists with some questions. Michelle Fach: So, that will be part of the Q&A. This session is being captioned in-person by a representative from the Canadian Hearing Services, thanks to the support of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. Michelle Fach: Well, we do not know definitely how the world of work and education will change after the pandemic. There is a little doubt that they will. In one year COVID 19 and the requirements for social distancing has brought about a digital transformation of learning and work, that otherwise would have been decades in the making. Companies have discovered that a large compliment of their staff can work from home without a loss of productivity. Schools have successfully delivered instruction, both synchronously and asynchronously, and teachers have developed innovative, novel, engaging ways to deliver their curriculum to a remote learner. People with disabilities have benefited from some aspects of remote work and learning. Working from home has meant individuals with visual impairments have been spared of a tiring and potential and dangerous commute. Michelle Fach: Students who have physical limitations have missed fewer classes due to winter storms. But the experience has not all been wholly positive. People with visual and cognitive disabilities have struggled more frequently with inaccessible documents. Virtual meeting software such as Zoom can be challenging. It can be a challenging interface with people who are neuro-diverse or experience anxiety. And those with hearing impairments have to deal with poor audio quality or a lagging ASL interpretation. Michelle Fach: Page 1 of 25 So, if we are moving to a world where more remote or hybrid or blended learning and working is inevitable, how do we ensure that this is a new world, that this new world is an inclusive and accessible, free from barriers from individuals with disabilities, as far as we can make it. How can we design it to leverage the largely untapped potential of people with disabilities as a source of talent ideas? Michelle Fach: How do we do this in the face of compounding challenges, such as a lack of access to high speed internet or the impacts of poverty or gender on the ability to work from home? Is the challenge of inclusion simply a matter of tweaking our technology and making accessible documents or is it more complicated? These are the questions that our panelists are eager to address today. Our first panelist, Deborah Stienstra, holds the Jarislowsky Chair in Families and Work and is the Director of the Live Work Well Research Center at the University of Guelph. Welcome Debra. Michelle Fach: Next, we have Dr. Mahadeo Sukhai. He is the Director of Research and Chief Inclusion and Accessibility Officer idea team with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. Michelle Fach: And Dr. Jutta Treviranus is the Director and Founder of the Inclusion Design Research Center and professor in the Faculty of Design at OCAD University in Toronto. She established a graduate program in inclusion design, and also heads the Inclusive Design Institute, a multi university center of expertise. Michelle Fach: So, we are going to start off this panel with Debra. I will pass it over to you. Deborah Stienstra: Thanks so much, Michelle. It's a pleasure to be here and I'm just going to share my screen. I hope it's going to work. Deborah Stienstra: And can you let me know if that's okay? Michelle Fach: Yeah, we can see your screen. It's not in presentation mode but we can see it. Deborah Stienstra: Great. Well, I'm happy. Deborah Stienstra: No, that's going to be even worse. Isn't it? Michelle Fach: Yeah. Page 2 of 25 Deborah Stienstra: There you go. Michelle Fach: That's good. Deborah Stienstra: Now you're getting which screen? Michelle Fach: We can see your presentation perfectly. Deborah Stienstra: Okay. Perfect. Deborah Stienstra: Well, thank you so much for inviting me and it's a pleasure to be here at the Accessibility Conference this year. Today, I wanted and was asked to speak a little bit about working and learning from home from an intersectional perspective. Deborah Stienstra: And so, on the screen, I've put my comments and I'll try and stick fairly close to them but I'll also try and model good practice and describe what's on the screen. So, on the screen is a picture of two women. Folks who identify as women and who are using sign language and have their faces covered with, or at least their mouths are covered with masks. Deborah Stienstra: Overall, what I'd like to do is during this talk is to use an intersectional approach, which is trying to look at the diversity of people with disabilities in Canada and specifically to examine work from home for diverse people with disabilities. The COVID-19 related impacts related to work from home on people with disabilities and post-COVID strategies. I'm not going to spend any time in the formal presentation talking about learning from home but I'm happy to share some of the results of the study we did that included education and learning from home. Deborah Stienstra: So, as is probably for this audience, well-known information, before COVID-19 people with disabilities had and continue to have substantially lower employment rates than people without disabilities. In the 2017 Canadian survey on disabilities, 59% of people with disabilities, working age people with disabilities, were employed while people without disabilities, it was closer to 80%. Deborah Stienstra: And when we look with an intersectional analysis that the diversity of people with disabilities, we recognize that those rates vary for people with different aspects of impairment, for different genders, for people of different ages and for people who identify themselves as indigenous. For example, we Page 3 of 25 know that people with intellectual disabilities have some of the lowest rates of employment. And we know that women with disabilities generally have lower rates than men. And we know that people with more complex or multiple impairments have lower employment rates. Deborah Stienstra: The ame survey talked also about what it takes to get people with disabilities into the workplace. And they identified four key employment workplace accommodations for people with disabilities. And the four workplace accommodations were modified work hours, modify duties, modified workstations and remote work. It's important to note that the requirements for workplace accommodations were highest among those people who had what, Statistics Canada calls, more severe disabilities or who had multiple or co-occurring impairments. They happen to be women or identify as women and surprisingly, were in management or professional occupations. So, pre-COVID, we see that employers could ensure a greater proportion of people with disabilities if they had flexible hours, if they had flexible jobs and if they allowed some people to work from home. Accommodations are not always a equipment requirement. Deborah Stienstra: So, in the summer and fall, our center, the Live Work Well Research Center was invited by Employment and Social Development Canada to conduct a fairly large qualitative and quantitative research study on the using disability and gender intersectional analysis lens to look at COVID-19 policies and their impacts on diverse people with disabilities. It was a large study. As I said, we interviewed people across Canada. Although, we focused on five provinces. We did a survey of the literature. We looked at policy analysis, we interviewed key informants and this 140 page report covers 19 different thematic areas. So that's why I'm focusing specifically on employment and the workplace. Deborah Stienstra: We also presented the findings of our report to the ministers, what was then called the ministers, COVID-19 Disability Advisory Group and got some feedback from them about this. Two key findings were that people with disabilities were largely invisible in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, despite being at greater risk of getting COVID-19 because of congregate living or having support providers come into their homes or a variety of structural reasons. There was also more difficulty in meeting their day to day needs, including food, healthcare, and support services. Deborah Stienstra: There were some specific COVID-19 employment impacts. First of all, there is a disproportionately high job loss among people with disabilities. And that job loss especially affected young people with disabilities, women with disabilities, those experiencing more than one impairment and those with lower levels of education.