Review

New tech, old attitudes

ENABLING TECHNOLOGY: disabled people, work and new technology
Alan Roulestone
Open University Press, 1998, £14.99

Employment is generally regarded as conferring social status, providing an income and ideally contributing towards an individual’s wellbeing and sense of worth.

Research suggests that disabled people face undue levels of unemployment relative to non-disabled people. Of all disabled people of working age, about one third have a job, another third are deemed ‘permanently unable to work’, and the remaining third are classified as unemployed, retired early, keeping house or in education.

In a world where keyboard skills are now taught in infant classes, is new technology enabling some disabled workers to gain enhanced access to employment and a more enabling work environment?

Through a series of in-depth interviews with disabled people, this book examines the promises of new technology and looks at its impact, positive and negative, on disabled people’s working lives.

The government-funded ‘Special Aids to Employment’ scheme is critically explored, as are the experiences of 30 disabled people in terms of work and new technology. Roulstone also outlines the policy implications of his research findings and re-evaluates the role of new technology.

The development of new technology has taken place within traditional assumptions and practices, based on the premise that there is ‘something wrong’ with disabled people. Employment support to disabled people is traditionally the preserve of occupational therapists and rehabilitation professionals working within the deficit model, which accepts this ‘something wrong’ with disabled people, and recognises that their role is to help disabled people ‘to escape their bodily problems’.

Roulstone shows how this emphasis on rehabilitation means that new technology is seen as compensating for the deficient body, rather than addressing disabling barriers which are endemic to the workplace.

He concludes that only when disabled people’s rights are supported by government policy will they have the choice to use new technology to facilitate access to paid work. He identifies barriers such as negative attitudes, disabling structures and inappropriate use of new technology, and suggests a number of policy initiatives.

The book’s strength lies in the comments of disabled people themselves, who recognise only too well the subtlety of practices which have systematically excluded them since the industrial revolution.

As one interviewee said: ‘I can take advantage of the new technology – but it is probably going to be denied to me.’