For Employees With Disabilities, Technology Accessibility Barely Gets a Passing Grade

Close to half (45%) of disabled workers rate their workplace software accessibility features as fair to poor.

In August 2023, there were 7.8 million employees in the U.S. with a disability—the highest number on record.^[1] More than ever, employers need to learn how to set these workers up for success in order to attract, retain, and help them reach full productivity. 

Unfortunately, we find that workers with disabilities are often let down in one increasingly critical area: software. According to Capterra’s 2023 Tech Accessibility Survey, a majority of employees with a disability say it would be difficult to use the software at their job without any special accommodations or accessibility features.*

On the accommodations front, our employees say companies are providing great support. When it comes to accessibility, though, many say important software features—like the ability to customize fonts or use keyboard shortcuts—are either lacking or low-quality.

Our advice is two-fold. HR departments need to be ready to give employees with disabilities the reasonable accommodations they need in order to get the most out of software and emerging tech like artificial intelligence (AI). They also need to keep accessibility top of mind with new software purchases.

B2B software vendors also need to understand that accessibility benefits everyone. By not implementing important accessibility features and ensuring they’re of sufficient quality, vendors are not only hampering a growing portion of the U.S. workforce, but missing out on a great way to make their product more user-friendly.

Software makes or breaks the disabled employee experience 

Studies show that the rise of remote and hybrid work in recent years has allowed people with disabilities to find more opportunities for employment.^[2] While this is great news, this shift to remote and hybrid work hasn’t come without its share of challenges for the disabled—especially when it comes to technology. 

Reports of discrimination caused by the widespread use of video conferencing software for meetings and job interviews during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, led the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to update their guidance this year regarding employees with hearing or visual disabilities. ^[3,4]

And that’s just one type of software. The nature of work in 2023 means workers need to use multiple types of software systems in their day-to-day. If employers can’t offer equitable access across all the software they use for all disability types, the employee experience for those with disabilities will suffer considerably.

Our survey results bear this out. Not only do 82% of employees with a disability say software is “somewhat” or “extremely” important for them to be able to do their job, but only 17% are extremely confident they could do their job as expected without software.

In order to provide equitable access to software, companies can’t give the same experience to disabled employees that they would give to everyone else. According to our survey, without special accommodations or accessibility features, most employees with a disability (57%) say it would be difficult to use the software provided at their job.

Breaking this figure down by disability type, we find that employees with blindness or low vision have the most difficulty without these aids, while those with a physical disability or reduced mobility have the least difficulty.

Without these aids, disabled employees who have difficulty using their company’s software say it impacts everything from doing day-to-day tasks (33%) to entering/analyzing data (28%) and collaborating with co-workers (18%).

Ultimately, if companies want disabled employees to be successful, it all hinges on the accommodations that HR provides and the accessibility features that vendors include in their system options.

Employers do well on accommodations, but vendors have work to do on accessibility

According to the ADA, employees with disabilities are entitled to “reasonable accommodations” at work so they can use company software. An employee with blindness or low vision might need a screen reader, for example, while someone with a physical disability preventing them from using a mouse and keyboard might need a speech recognition system to be able to use software through voice commands.

For most employees with disabilities, accommodations aren’t necessary. Only 18% of the respondents in our survey say they need special accommodations to be able to use software at their job.

When a disabled employee does need an accommodation, though, 64% rely on their employer to provide it. And in these cases, we find that employers are providing more than adequate support.

We can pin this high success rate on the extremely low financial burden required by employers to provide these accommodations. In a study by the Job Accommodation Network (JAN), 49% of employers said the accommodations they gave to employees with disabilities cost $0 to implement. Of the 43% of accommodations that did cost money, the median expenditure was only $300—a figure that has trended downward over time.^[5]

Much more often, employees with disabilities rely on the software itself to provide important accessibility features to make the system usable. Someone with dyslexia, a learning disability that affects reading comprehension, might need to change the font type to improve legibility. A deaf employee might need closed captions to watch videos.

And it’s here where we find that software vendors leave something to be desired. Overall, 45% of employees with a disability rate the amount of accessibility features in their work software as fair or poor. Thirty-eight percent say the same about their quality.

Broken down by disability type, employees with an intellectual, developmental, or learning disability are the most likely to rate the amount of accessibility features in their work software as fair or poor (53%), while those with blindness or low vision are most likely to rate the quality of their accessibility features as fair or poor (46%).

A "fair" amount of accessibility features may have been acceptable in the distant past. But with the disabled employee population continuing to grow and rely more on software to be fully engaged and productive, it’s past time that accessibility is given more emphasis by both businesses and software vendors.

How to make software at work more accessible and inclusive

Managing employees with disabilities has always been overly preoccupied with compliance. But Gartner argues that companies need to move beyond statutory requirements and anti-discrimination policies if they want to attract and retain a successful disabled workforce:

“To win in the ongoing competition for talent, organizations must move beyond compliance to prioritize disability inclusion. They must remove the social, cultural, and systemic barriers that exclude people with disabilities from the workforce.”^[6]

This need for inclusion extends to software. Both HR departments and B2B software vendors need to do more if they want to make software accessible and inclusive of the disabled community.

Make accessibility a priority for future software purchases

Seventy-six percent of employees with a disability in our survey agree that their employer should prioritize accessibility more when purchasing software in the future. This is important, because as much as accessibility is a feel-good initiative, vendors aren’t going to be pushed to put the resources towards it unless customers start demanding it.

HR should be the biggest advocate here. If your business is purchasing new software, ensure someone from HR is on hand to evaluate vendors and ask about accessibility features. 

Speaking of vendors…

Focus updates on the most important accessibility features

B2B software vendors need to add more and higher quality accessibility features to make their software more user-friendly to the disabled community. But which features should they prioritize? Our respondents have opinions:

• Forty percent of employees with blindness or low vision say the ability to customize fonts is an important feature they need to use software at their job. Being able to change the font size, in particular, benefits these workers immensely.

• Fifty-one percent of employees who are deaf or hard of hearing say video captions are important, with audio transcription coming in a close second (47%).

• Both employees with a physical disability and those with an intellectual, developmental, or learning disability pick keyboard shortcuts or navigation as their most important accessibility feature (37% and 40%, respectively).

Trello has a list of useful keyboard shortcuts on its website^[7]

These features actually benefit everyone, even those without a disability. Keyboard shortcuts can allow workers to be more efficient, while video captions help employees garner information from a video without turning on their audio and possibly disrupting a co-worker. In the end, more options are always better.

Explore the accessibility possibilities with AI

In recent months, we’ve seen how generative AI can make quick work of routine HR tasks and transform eCommerce. The AI arms race is in full effect as software vendors try to bake in the most impressive AI bots and capabilities into their software platforms.

But AI also has the potential to make software infinitely more accessible for disabled people. Our respondents agree—77% say that the advancement of artificial intelligence in software will help them be more productive at their job.

Whether it’s helping them through predictive text in messages, real-time visualizations of data, or recommendations for next actions, AI can go from an efficiency booster for a nondisabled employee to the difference between usable and unusable software for someone with a disability. 

So if you’re a B2B software developer exploring use cases for AI, or a company wondering how to best take advantage of AI in the workplace, accessibility is an overlooked but potentially fruitful application.

Note: The screenshots of applications included in this article are examples to show a feature in context and are not intended as endorsements or recommendations.