We can demolish stairs and install ramps. Doors can be made of lighter materials so that they are easy to open, walls can be torn down, and furniture can be modified. New building codes can be implemented and enforced. Advocacy groups, a functioning parliament, inspired designers, and construction workers come together to create a physical world where anyone can move freely between, within, and around the buildings where we work, play, and sleep. The process may be layered with stops and starts, and take longer than we like, but eliminating barriers to accessibility isn’t impossible; it gets done.

What doesn’t get done, however, is the removal of attitudinal barriers, especially as it pertains to employment for people with disabilities. Sure, many large corporations are implementing policies based around equality, and hiring more people with disabilities amongst various other initiatives, but what we need more than anything is a unified effort to change attitudes and misconceptions about people with disabilities in much the same way as we eliminate the physical barriers.

“I find it surprising that so many people have negative attitudes about what a person with a disability can accomplish when you consider that almost everybody has people with disabilities in their family or amongst friends,” Frank Smith, director of NEADS, admits over the phone from his office in Ottawa, ON. “They’re aware of the barriers and of the problems that people with disabilities face, but they are also aware of how accomplished their family members or friends are who have disabilities.” And, if we remember, once upon a time the majority of North American males thought that females shouldn’t work or have the right to vote, even though they lived with, and loved their wives, daughters and mothers. It’s a baffling, but ultimately very human paradox.

For Smith, the mainstream media needs to do a better job of covering disability and the accomplishments of people with disabilities. “I think that it’s happening, albeit slowly,” he admits optimistically, pointing to the fact that the Paralympics have gotten more coverage lately. While this is true, a Victoria’s Secret store opening receives front-page treatment while a story on a profitable IT company that only employs people with autism is relegated to the back page, if it gets covered at all. Tall, leggy blondes in push-up bras sell newspapers; a person with a disability who becomes a doctor does not. If the front page of a newspaper was a position with a company, the blonde would be hired over the smart, talented person with a disability. “The worst type of discrimination in the workplace isn’t the kind where somebody says ‘I won’t hire you because you’re in a wheelchair,’” Smith explains. “It’s somebody who goes through the exercise of interviewing somebody who is a wheelchair user but right from the start decides they are not going to hire them.”

“The worst barrier is an attitudinal barrier,” explains Madeleine Meilleur, Ontario Minister of Community and Social Services. She’s referring to common myths employers have when they consider hiring a person with a disability. “You are going to be sick more often, be away from work more often, if it doesn’t work I won’t be able to get rid of you— these are all misconceptions, they are myths.” So what Minister Meilleur and the government of Ontario decided to do was launch a campaign that attacked these stereotypes head on, appropriately named Don’t Waste Talent.

“It’s a promotional campaign aimed at recognizing people with disabilities as a widely undiscovered source of talent,” she explains. Alongside a surprisingly well-designed and functionally efficient website, the campaign includes sessions for employers where they can learn about hiring people with disabilities. Interestingly, it isn’t the government telling employers what to do, but companies who regularly hire people with disabilities instead. “Having employers like TD Bank speak to the potential employers about these myths goes a long way. They see, not by testimony from the government, but from their peers saying ‘No, that’s not true, and I will never hesitate to hire someone with a disability.’"

It’s a step in the right direction, but we need more campaigns that target how people with disabilities are viewed, and we need to approach it with the same fervor that we approach the elimination of physical barriers. Smith remembers a time when schools were quite averse to making their buildings acceptable. “We’d get people who would say ‘Well, we don’t really need to do that because we only have Mary in a wheelchair on campus.’ If the only person with a visible physical disability is that one person, then it may have something to do with the fact that your university is so brutally inaccessible that nobody who is a wheelchair user wants to attend. If you build it, they will come. And it’s the same thing with attitudes.”

Photo: Monkey Business Images/Thinkstock