NSF Convergence Accelerator: Accelerating Disability Inclusion in Workplaces through Technology

The labor market participation rate of persons with disabilities (PWD) is significantly lower than persons without disabilities. There are more than one billion PWDs in the world and constitute a source of talent for employment towards the development and offering of products and services. The challenges faced by this population in contributing equally in our society has implications not only to our economies, but also human rights, equality, equity, and diversity.

Intellectual Merit: The workshop is innovative in that it is forward-looking (pre-emptive as opposed to reactionary) in creating a research agenda encompassing various emerging and expected developments in technology in conjunction with human factors, and social and behavioral sciences. In addition, by taking a comprehensive and universal design view, it plans to consider all the major disabilities (vision, hearing, cognitive and intellectual, physical and mobility, and combinations of these.

The workshop will focus on developing specific assistive technologies to be designed to integrate PWD in future workforce and the associated education and training initiatives that will be required. The project will be informed by participants that span nonprofits serving PWD, employers of PWD, workforce training institutions, national disability inclusion advocates individuals with disabilities, researchers from academia and industry.

Broader Impacts:Societal broader impacts include: 1) development of work tools and technologies (and associated tech transfer), that increases the workforce participation and productivity of people with disabilities and the general population; and 2) creation of a model for other similar future efforts (beyond work) to address disability inclusion.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.