Disability Statistics
This article outlines—as the title would suggest—a number of facts and statistics concerning disabilities and socioeconomic status. Corollaries were drawn between household income & education levels, and various disabilities.
The statistic I found most important to our discussion was this:
People with disabilities are nearly twice as likely as people without disabilities to have an annual household income of $15,000 or less.
Although I for some reason think this report includes emotional or mental disabilities as well as some of the handicaps discussed in the scenario article, this statistic had me thinking of last week’s discussion of the digital divide. In this case it seems two-pronged—even if some of these disabled people have access to proliferating technologies, they are unable to use them.
As solutions are offered to close both of these technological gaps, it makes me happy to see governmental actions being taken to remove online discriminations towards the blind, deaf, crippled, etc. (I don’t feel entirely comfortable using the word “discrimination,” as it seems unrealistic that web-designers would harbor a misaligned hatred for the blind, intentionally designing web-sites as inaccessible, but I can imagined the disabled might see inadequate sites as offensive—no pun intended.)
6 comments:
I'm usually not interested in statistics just because they tend to be very boring, but this article definitely opened my eyes. I agree, Dale, that the most important statistic on there was about the income if the disabled. It does seem, as we talked about last week, that there is quite the digital divide amoung those in poverty and those not. It is really sad to me to now know that some disabled are a part of that group as well. Something obviously needs to be done.
You say you are glad that the government is getting involved and helping these people, but Vanessa said in a comment on John's blog that she doesn't believe they will. I think this is something we could talk about as a class.
These statistics are irrelevant unless put in context with the other readings for tuesday's class. What was most suprising to me is that the disabled demographic was larger than I had expected. The WIA initiative has begun to adress the need for universal accesibility of site content, but not the overall accesibility of the internet for those disabled with a low household income. Will there next be an initiative to install the software and hardware needed for universal content accesibility on public terminals?
I agree that these statistics are fairly irrelevant unless of course we apply them to people with disabilities using the internet. Perhaps much of the reason for the low income is because of the lower amount of internet usage for people with disabilities. If we are to agree that many of the average or high paying jobs in America now days are tightly correlated with internet applications, then we must also agree that the lack of internet usage by people with disabilites can be closely related to the low incomes.
The statistics mentioned in the article convey straight statistics without any sorts of connections made. As Merin said, it doesn't really say much to have several statistics listed on the page, and without taking other things into account, it means nothing. I admit that there are several statistics here that do surprise me though, I had no idea of the exact number of Americans with disabilities. It seems very important that this data is being logged, something can actually then be done about any potential discriminatory problem.
Mind-boggling for sure. Hate to chime in where everyone has already made the point, but these stats actually translated into real information for me, and I was surprised by them. Especially the regionality. It puts a lot of things into perspective, and I couldn't help (oh, dear, here it comes) but consider Katrina. We like to think of ourselves as an enlightened, rich society, land of the free, home of the brave. But we let "our fellow Americans" live in ruin and underprivelage in Alabama and hope it doesn't make the news so we don't have to look at it in HD.
I also found these statistics surprising. There was an article in the last couple of days in the NYTs that I cannot, unfortunately, find at the moment, that claims that 58% of Americans will experience poverty for at least one year during their lives. Again, a decontextualized statistic, but thought provoking.
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