ADA National Network.
Tuesday April 13, 2021 ADA National Network.
Employment and Economic Self‑Sufficiency.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Good day to you all, welcome to the opening session of the Americans with Disabilities Act State of the Science Virtual Conference.  We're delighted to have you all here.  My name is Kurt Johnson with the University of Washington and I co‑direct the Americans with Disabilities Act Knowledge Translation Center, one of the 11 centers that make up the ADA National Network.  I am acting here on behalf of Dr. Mark Harniss, who is the principal investigator for our project and was not able to be here today.  Many of you are familiar with the National ADA Network, but those who are not, it's made up of 10 regional centers and the regional centers provide information and guidance about the Americans with Disabilities Act to anyone in the United States through a toll free line and E‑mail.  Regional centers provide training to businesses, nonprofits, state agencies and other organizations on request.  This slide shows you the states covered by each region.  You can find this information on our website as well.  The ADA Knowledge Translation Center supports the national effort of the regional centers by coordinating the development of information materials and initiatives, including the national website and social media platforms.  The network is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.
Now, we'd like to make some acknowledgments the ADA National Network is funded by the National Institute of Disability Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research, an agency within the Administration on Community Living.  We' like to acknowledge and thank our funders for their support of our work in the conference.  I'll now review some of the important things to know about how to use the zoom webinar.  I know many of you are using zoom a lot so I will do this fast.  First, a few things about zoom webinar interface.  You should see the slides on the right, and the presenter and ASL interpreter on the right.  You can use your mouse to click and adjust the size of the video and PowerPoint.  We will use the chat and question and answer, I will explain it in a minute.  They are located on the bottom of your screen.  The audio settings are the left bottom of your screen, the advanced view option is the top middle of your screen.  Now let's talk about audio.
The audio for today's webinar is being broadcast through your computer, please make sure your speakers are turned on, your headphones plugged in.  You can verify the audio settings using the audio settings options.  You can adjust the volume on your audio settings option.  If you have audio problems you can connect audio through your phone.  To do that ‑‑ next slide.
Select audio settings to switch to phone and follow directions to dial the number log in with the webinar and personal I.D.  Next slide.
We will have opportunities for you to ask questions.  All attendees can ask questions.  Questions should be submitted via Q and A you have the option to submit question anonymously.  Do not submit questions in chat, we will not be monitoring that for questions.  If you are listening on the phone, not connected to the webinar platform, E‑mail your questions to ADAKT@UW.EDU.  Next slide.
If you see a question that you like, you can up vote it by clicking the thumbs up icon.  Up voted questions rise to the top and be more likely to be asked.  Next slide.  If you need technical assistance during the webinar send a message in the chat area, or E‑mail ADAKT@UW.EDU.  Next slide.  We will have real‑time captioning, also called CART, provided within zoom and Streamtext.  The Streamtext link will be posted in chat.  You open a separate browser window to view the captioning.  You can resize your screen so that you are able to view both the Streamtext and view zoom platform side by side if you use a desktop computer.  Zoom offers the option to mouse over and move the captioning box anywhere on the screen to customize your view.  With zoom you can choose to view the full transcript by mousing over to the CC live transcript and selecting view full transcript option.  Next slide.  ASL.  We will have ASL interpreters with us for the entire conference.  The interpreter video is spotlighted, so they always show on the screen.  There will be two ASL interpreters, they will take turns during the session, there may be a brief pause during transition.  Note, tablet and phone options for viewing the video will differ depending on your device.  Next slide.  Visual description.  To ensure equivalent visual access, the centers are asked to describe any visual content on the slide.  In addition, presenters may provide visual description of themselves.  So for example, I might say, my name is Kurt Johnson, I am a white man in my late 60s with reddish hair and blue eyes.  I am wearing a shirt today.  That's just increasingly common practice but one that may not ‑‑ may be new to some.
Next slide.
With that, let's begin the day.  Today's theme is Employment and Economic Self‑Sufficiency.  First we will hear from today's keynote speaker Maria Town with the American Association of People with Disabilities.  Maria will present for 30 to 35 minutes and then we will start with questions.  After that we will have a short break and begin the 5 research presentations covering a variety of topics related to employment and economic self‑sufficiency.  We won't take questions in the presentation but have 20 minutes after the research presentation.  After that we will take another short break, and after the break we will have closing speaker John Tschida, who will summarize what we heard today and where to go from here.  With that I would like to welcome Maria Town with the American Association of People with Disabilities.  Maria?
>> Maria Town:  Thank you so much Kurt.  Hello everyone.  Welcome to the first day of the ADA National Network State of the Science Conference.  My name is Maria Town, and I serve as the President and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities.  I am very grateful to be here with all of you today, including the ADA Network for having me.  I am specifically grateful to Linea Johnson and Dr. Mark Harniss, who have done a great job pulling today's content together.  The ADA Network has done such critical work over the past 30 years, providing technical research surrounding ADA implementation and compliance.  And given the rapid changes in technology, service delivery, employment and education that we have seen over the past year alone, your work is more important than ever and it's one of the reasons that I am so excited to speak with you today.  Next slide.
Maybe I can control them.  So, for our conversation today, I wanted to tell you a little bit about the American Association of People with Disabilities, AAPD.  Discuss both encouraging and concerning trends around COVID and disability employment.  And discuss some other policy and programmatic trends that are sure to impact the future of disability employment as we move towards a post‑pandemic world.  Finally, I hope to leave you all with questions to reflect upon as you participate in this conference and continue to advance disability rights, accessibility and inclusion.  Next slide.
Who are we?  Founded in 1995, AAPD is a national cross‑disability civil right organization that works to advance the political and economic power of the disability community.  We are both a disability‑led organization and a cross‑disability organization, meaning that all of AAPD's employees and board members are disabled people themselves.  We work across all experiences of disability, whether it's related to children with developmental disabilities who grew up to be disabled adults, or seniors who have aged into disability but may not identify as a part of the community.  We work to achieve our mission by operating as a convener in programs like our Tech Forum and leading coalitions We Will Ride working with auto manufacturers to make fully accessible, fully autonomous vehicles.  We work to increase the power of the disability community by operating to be a connector through summer internship program which connects students and recent graduates with disabilities to paid internships in Washington, DC.  Participants in this program are provided with housing and receive both career development and leadership development opportunities.  We work to develop political power in the disability community by operating as a catalyst through programs like REV Up which focuses on increasing disability voter registration and turnout.  We were very busy last year.  And through REV Up we support a network of 32 state disability voter coalitions.  In addition to these programs, we also engage in significant policy development and advocacy across a number of issues affecting people with disabilities.  Next slide.
So, we all know, it really goes without saying, that the COVID pandemic impacted each and every one of our lives.  But its impact has not felt by everyone in the same way.  For the disability community, COVID's impact have been both profound and dire.  We have seen 40% of the close to 600,000 COVID deaths have been people with disabilities in congregant settings, with congregant housing that primarily is housing disabled people of color experiencing death at twice the rate of congregate settings that primarily house white disabled people.  There have been major issues with access to information, education, services, food insecurity and more.  But when it comes to disability employment, there are some shifts in the world of work that hold significant promise.  Here are some headlines from major news outlets during the pandemic, specifically related to disability employment.  Quote:  Remote work during pandemic providing silver lining for people with disabilities.  That's from NBC.  Quote:  Disabled nurses find COVID silver lining.  Hope for more inclusive future.  Forbes.  That is an article in Forbes about disabled nurses teleworking, using telework and closing health disparities.  Indeed, many members of the disability community has been asking for telework as a reasonable accommodation for decades.  All too often individuals were told quote:  This job is ineligible for telework or this position can't be performed remotely.  There are very likely folks joining us today who were told these exact things when applying for a position or seeking reasonable accommodations.  And yet, when the pandemic struck, we saw employers of all sizes, private industry and public entities, pivot to making telework possible.  The response from the disability community has been a course of two things:  Finally!  We have been asking for this.  And the second response is like, okay, now that everyone, and by that we mean nondisabled people, need telework you will make it happen.  We see that.  It's okay, we will take this win.  The expansion of telework, flexible work schedules and flexible workplaces, could have enormous implications for people with disabilities who all too often have experienced significant barriers getting to work because of inaccessible transportation, infrastructure and workplaces.  Or other employees who the nature of the disability themselves makes them vulnerable to things like a virus.  Immunosuppressed employees have existed forever.  Other trends that we have seen, related to the expansion of telework, include increases in productivity.  Headline from NPR reads:  For these federal employees telework means productivity is up, their backlog is down.  That article specifically focused on productivity gains that the Social Security Administration was seeing.  Workers in SSA were being able to process through a greater number of benefits claims and appeals and were getting benefits checks out to people faster and quicker.  They were also in many cases getting denials out to people faster and quicker.  But many employers beyond SSA have experienced productivity gain, and that is encouraging when we think about the future of telework as a strategy for disability employment.  Another positive trend related to telework during the pandemic has been reduced overhead.  This reduced overhead ‑‑ this was a line from a report from the National Council on State Legislature ‑‑ has been particularly attractive to state and local governments seeking to eliminate historic budget shortfalls.  And this has implications for people with disabilities both in terms of employment as well as other aspects of our day‑to‑day lives.  For employers telework has decreased the need for office space, reducing real estate cost, supplies and utility costs as well.  For state and local government, the shortfall that they are experiencing this year is much deeper than shortfalls they experience in any year of the Great Recession, you know, 10 years ago.  In just four months of the pandemic, state and local governments furloughed or laid off 1.5 million workers, and that's twice as many in all of the Great Recession.  So, people with disabilities, the state and local budget shortfalls can mean cuts in critical programs and services that allow folks to get their daily needs met, live in their community and go to work.
Finally, excuse the language for anyone offended by this, our last headline from MIT Technology Review:  This 2020 has sucked, but there are some small silver linings.  And in this article they discuss the expansion of access to captioning and meetings large and small.  We have seen a huge investment in the further development of automated AI captions which has meant more people can access captioning not only at work but in their day‑to‑day interactions with family and friends.  Again, I will say, immunosuppressed people have always existed and so the work that our society and culture have done to invest in things like regular hand washing, mask wearing and regularly available hand sanitizer have meant that many folks feel are hopeful that they could return to work or engage in their communities in new ways and safer ways post‑pandemic, so these are all pretty promising trends.  Next slide.
While I acknowledge the excitement and hopefulness the expanded telework, availability of captions and other changes in our culture could bring for disability employment, I also want to highlight that it could also continue existing disparities that we see today and even before the pandemic.  While the job market has rebounded somewhat since the beginning of the pandemic, we recovered over half of the jobs lost, concerns are still present about the impact that this will have on workers, and particularly for people with disabilities.  So, for people with disabilities, unemployment is about twice what it was before the pandemic began.  As of September 2020, one in five workers with disabilities have lost their jobs all together.  More than 40% of working people with disabilities were in jobs with, quote, limited telework options before the pandemic began.  And these workers in these positions experienced the greatest decline in employment between February and September.  It's important that we acknowledge that many of the jobs that people with disabilities work in are frontline essential workers that don't have telework as a possibility.  And if these jobs are cut or they are laid off, they are not coming back in a virtual way.  And this is critical to acknowledge because people with disabilities experience greater disconnection from affordable and adequate broadband services.  Approximately 10 to 15 million students don't have broadband at home.  When we think about disability employment across the continuum of a person's life from the moment that they are a young person with a disability transitioning into the world of work to a, you know, seasoned employee, the lack of connection to adequate, affordable, accessible broadband could impact every moment of a person's career.  So, again, 10 to 15 million students don't have broadband at home.  People with disabilities generally are 20% less likely to be connected to broadband at home or to have technology to go online than people without disabilities.  And 40% of seniors don't have residential service and so they are not able to connect to things like, sorry excuse me, they are not able to connect to work to connect to other jobs‑related supports or things like telemedicine which have increasingly taken on life‑or‑death importance.
And the numbers are even worse for people of color.  The digital divide is real.  And our growing use of telework and other virtual related work arrangement means that, again, we could further amplify disparities in disability employment that we see along both racial, gender and age‑related lines.  Next slide.  So, as we think about a sort of post‑pandemic world and what that will mean for disability employment and what is happening with disability employment now, in addition to navigating the work in a new way potentially via telework and all of virtual engagement there are also new tools on the scene that people with disabilities are having to interact with that may be producing concerning results.  These are algorithmic driving ‑‑ driven hiring tools.  These tools are being used by employers to effectively sort through and identify talent in large application pools.  Because of our nation's recent job losses, these applicant pools for jobs are likely to be growing larger and larger.  Examples of these tools are things like a data scraper that combs through resumes and identifies desired experiences or flags gaps that may be concerning to an employer.  Another example of an algorithmic driven hiring tool is a text that determines an applicant's attention span or ability to make eye contact.  Now, many employers may also believe that algorithmic driven software will identify characteristics of successful employees that human recruiters would not identify on their own, and you know, if we are all being honest, the traditional sort of job search interview process is ripe with ableism.  And things that job seekers with disabilities or potential employees with disabilities know don't feel quite right but can't actually pinpoint.  For example, when an interviewer says, you are not the right fit for us.  So some employers may be investing in the tools because they hope and think that they, again, will identify successful characteristics of an applicant that a human recruiter would not.  We really like to believe, as highlighted in the telework example, that technology is an equalizer; and it can be, but it can only be an equalizer we hope it could be if we are careful.  Because algorithmic hiring tools replicate the biases that people have.  As you all know, the ADA explicitly prohibits against hiring processes that discriminate on the basis of disability.  And the ADA requires that an employment test be provided in an accessible format, if the format is not accessible then reasonable accommodations be made without prejudicing an applicant.  How is that working in this new environment of AI driven tools?  Where does ‑‑ will an applicant know how to request an accommodation if they are working with a robot who is just asking them questions via chat bot, or if that test is requiring spoken answers, and again they needed an accommodation, how are we ensuring that the folks in our community understand what the process of getting reasonable accommodations look like now.  The ADA disfavors hiring selections that screen out or tend to screen out disabled candidates.  So for a tool that uses a personality test, or tries to track someone's attention span, for employees that have ADHD or a disability like autism, they may get screened out by the nature of the test alone and there is no room to evaluate what is actually happening there.  At the same time, algorithmic hiring tools can be useful for job seekers with disabilities and job applicants with disabilities and I want to give a few of those examples too.  AI driven virtual gateway for candidates and employers to find job matches.  It can be an incredibly daunting process to begin searching for a job.  There are so many websites, so many different databases with potential jobs that someone, a potential candidate, may get overwhelmed before they even start.  Our ability is a tool that uses AI to help match a candidate's skills and preferences to jobs that they might excel in.  Another tool called STRIVR uses virtual reality to provide training opportunities, which again, in today's world, for employees with disabilities who may not have had as many pre‑employment training opportunities as nondisabled peers, this could be a great opportunity to address some of the training and development gaps in a safe way.  Getting more information about these tools and best practices and developing policies around the use of algorithmic hiring tools as they relate to people with disabilities, it's critical, and we know that now, but it will continue to be critical as more people with disabilities enter the workforce as a result of COVID.  Again, these may be individuals who have gaps on their resumes who never experienced navigating that before who may be experiencing disability in a very new way, and may not identify as disabled or know about the ADA may not know about reasonable accommodations.  And so we need to make sure these tools don't screen talented people out simply because they are unaware of their rights as new members of the disability community.  So, in addition to these new hiring tools that potential job candidates may be having to use for the first time, there are also some emergent policy and programmatic trends that may impact disability employment now and for many years into the future.  Next slide.  So, the Biden‑Harris administration recently introduced the American Jobs Plan it includes $400 billion ‑‑ and let me say that again, billion with a B, I keep having to remind myself ‑‑ for home and community‑based services.  I want to be clear, congress still has to create a legislative vehicle and pass this package.  In addition to the $400 billion for home and community‑based services, the package also expands long‑term services under Medicaid and permanently reauthorizes the Money Follows the Person program.  It provides increased wages for homecare workers and direct support workers.  It also includes 213 billion for affordable, sustainable housing, including building more than a million affordable and sustainable rental units.  This proposal does some important things that could reshape the landscape of disability employment.  Many people with disabilities are often forced to make an impossible choice between getting access to and maintaining support and care that they absolutely need in order to stay in their homes and stay alive and working.  Because of the nature of our current policy scheme, many people with disabilities are forced out of the workforce and into poverty, again, in order to make sure that they can eat and drink and get in and out of bed every day.  For people with disabilities who are not able to get things like Medicaid, their family members are also often forced out of the workforce in order to provide necessary caregiving and supports for the individual that they love.  This investment in‑home and community‑based services could mean that people with disabilities have opportunities to engage in the workforce in new ways as well as folks who are typically unpaid family caregivers.  We can see inclusion in the workplace advance in ways that it has not had the opportunity to do so before because of an historic lack of investment.  Relatedly, the Money Follows the Person program is a program that transitions people out of institutional settings and into the community.  Also, expanding long‑term services and supports would mean that we have a greater need for accessible, affordable housing and less of a need for institution.  And you can't make a huge investment in programmatic services without also making an investment in housing.  And this proposal does just that.  In AAPD's work around access to home and community‑based services, one of the persistent barriers that we hear from people with disabilities is the lack of consistent access to support workers, and that is in many ways due to the diminished wages that workers receive.  Home‑care work, direct‑support work is difficult and critical work and these workers should be paid wages that they deserve.  But, unfortunately, many states do not pay workers adequately so they leave these jobs.  Again, that not only has significant implications for the person with a disability and kind of day‑to‑day quality of life but it also often means they have to leave a job ‑‑ a job or career that they have loved.  One of the statistics highlighted many times is the number of women who left the workforce.  This proposal has the potential to not only increase consistent employment with people with disabilities but also women, and particularly women of color.  And that is incredibly important for us to acknowledge.
But, again, I want to be clear, it's still up to congress to craft this legislative vehicle.  I hope that all of you who are listening today have ideas about how this should be executed and what ‑‑ what this should look like, what the system should look like once this legislation passes, which I am saying with crossed ‑‑ crossed fingers.  One of the things ‑‑ next slide.  One of the things that I think a lot about when I look at President Biden's proposal and the Americans Jobs Plan is the disability community's core value of interdependence the disability community have recognized for such a long time that independence is a myth.  We are all dependent on one another to get our needs met.  And not only to get our needs met but to thrive.  Unfortunately, our current policy systems do not allow many people with disabilities to live our values of interdependence if an equitable way.  And so, I hope not only with the American Jobs Plan but also with other policy proposals in the future, especially as more people with disabilities are, I don't want to say being creative, but as more people with disabilities exist every day due to COVID and other aspects of our lives, it's incredibly important that we make sure folks understand and recognize the importance of interdependence and recognize that their lives have value.  So, with all of that, let's talk about some questions for the future.  And you have heard me kind of mention this a number of times but I will say it again.  How will COVID impact the size and profile of the disability workforce in the future?  How can we as a community of disabled people and our allies support COVID survivors transitioning to life with a disability.  Just to add some specifics around that, how can we make sure that our current service systems, whether they be vocational rehabilitation, home and community‑based services, inclusive education systems, and more, are robust enough to address the needs of this new population of people with disabilities.  Again, as they transition into life into a new way.  When we think about telework, I will tell you that one of my fears is that as telework expands, and more people with disabilities try to enter in to the world of work, employers will use this as a means to accommodate people with disabilities.  They will say okay you have a disability you can work from home.  My concern is that the kind of expansion of telework will remove the impetus for employers to make their physical workplaces accessible.  And more than their physical workplaces and in‑person workplaces accessible, there will be a potential loss of inclusive culture of these workplaces.  People ‑‑ we may, once again, see people with disabilities in their homes and not out in the world.  And not out in a workplace.  And at AAPD we have seen time and time again the power that having a person with a disability, who is open about their disability and visible in the workplace, the power that that has in shifting the culture of the workplace all together and in having inclusion.  How do we make sure it doesn't happen.  How do we ensure physical in‑person and virtual workplaces are both created to be accessible and inclusive.  How do we prevent telework from becoming a tool for segregation and remain a valued accommodation.  Finally ‑‑ not finally ‑‑ when thinking about the new tools being used in the employment and hiring space, how do we work together to ensure that artificial intelligence works to remove disability bias in the hiring process in the workplace and not replicate it.  What good and promising practices are out there, and how can we begin to influence the large employers who are already putting these tools to use to ensure that they ‑‑ that they remain compliant with their ADA obligations.  Finally, what does our care and support infrastructure look like when its primary building block is truly independence.  That's a big question and I am sure many of you have thought about it, and I am looking forward to hearing what your answers are.  Next slide.  So, it goes without saying that times are hard.  The past year has been really hard.  Times may be improving but they are still undoubtedly hard and we have so much work to do ahead of us to build a workforce, a nation and a world that is truly equitable and inclusive.  And in order to keep things going, in order to keep our advocacy and our movements going we need moments to celebrate, so I wanted to share some opportunities with all of you.  First, we have the AUCD gala on the evening of April 14th.  John Tschida leads AUCD.  You can find more information loading up the hashtag AUCD4ALL.  Two weeks later we have the AAPD leadership awards gala on April 28th.  And at our gala you will hear from President Biden, Congressman Don Young, Representative Ayanna Pressley Stacey Abrams and more.  You can find more information on our website at AAPD.com/gala.  
Finally, and this is not about joy specifically or celebration, but it is about an opportunity that I hope you all will amplify and not pass up, at AAPD annually we provide scholarships to undergraduate and graduate students studying in the fields of communication and media through our NBC Universal Tony Coelho Media Scholarship award.  The application closes May 20 and I would love to recognize some amazing students with this funding to support their education and future careers in media.  So, with that, I will thank you all very much for your time.  And I look forward to your questions.  Again, thank you for having me.  That concludes the presentation portion of my talk.
>> Thank you so much Maria.  Right now we have a few questions and we might have more as we move through them.  So, the first one we will start with is:  What legal reforms are needed to prevent disability discrimination through the use of algorithms?
>> MARIA TOWN:  That's a great question.  So, for ‑‑ I want to be clear, I am not an attorney.  There are probably many people on this ‑‑ there are, I shouldn't say probably ‑‑ there are many people on this call who could answer that better than I.  But I think one of the things that needs to happen is for disability organizations, legal scholars, experts to communicate existing requirements in the ADA and other federal civil rights law and disability nondiscrimination law to highlight how these algorithms are already violating the statute.  One of the things that we have seen is the proliferation of the civil rights audits of automated employment tools and algorithms, and they often have a gender and a race lens.  The disability lens is missing.  There hasn't been that work to build out, at least it hasn't ‑‑ the work that's happening has not yet cracked the surface in the same way that work on gender and race have when it comes to algorithmic bias.  We need to do more work on that and literally talk about this issue at any chance we have.  An example of this is in New York, New York City.  The New York City council was considering a local law that required a civil rights audit of any algorithmic‑based hiring tools the city was planning to use.  Again, the audit incorporated issues of racial nondiscrimination and gender nondiscrimination, and the disability community recently organized a letter to the city council to strongly encourage them to have a disability‑related audit component.  But we are not sure if they are going to include it.  What they are saying, there is not enough information out there.  I think we need to say there is enough information out there.  And entities like the ADA Network, which I know has done some work on this already, are great sources of knowledge.  One of the things that we are doing at AAPD is a new initiative:  Start Access.  And we created this initiative because we saw so many new pieces of technology that, again, hold so much promise for the disability community.  But they have to be retrofitted as soon as they hit the market.  With Start Access we are specifically focusing on AI‑based hiring tools and trying to make sure that they are accessible from the start.  So it's a brand new initiative that we kicked off at the end of last year we are putting together our steering committee now.  One of the things that we are going to do is gather and collect these examples of tools that are working in the opposite way that are actually trying to intentionally bring in and hire candidates with disabilities and making sure that folks know that there are solutions out there.  That this isn't necessarily a lost cause.  Next question.
>> Thank you very much.  Our next question is:  Well, I am going to paraphrase it a little bit.  You mentioned a little bit about housing.  But our question is also wondering about improving access to transportation.
>> MARIA TOWN:  Yes, that's an excellent question.  And I ‑‑ it's funny, when I was putting together this slide on telework with those positive headlines, as I read all of the ‑‑ all of the articles, they all mentioned the transportation kind of barrier issues.  In my head I was like, you know, we wouldn't have to be kind of celebrating the telework is happening so much if we just made transportation and commuting easier and accessible in the first place.  So, there are two things that I want it put on your radar.  One is that many municipal and county and state transportation systems have been incredibly hard hit by the pandemic.  This is deeply concerning for the disability community and for disability employment specifically because many people with disabilities, like myself, rely on public transit to get around.  And if the ‑‑ if these transit systems are not able to make up their budget shortfalls we will see cuts in these services, will which cut people with disabilities off from things like their communities and their jobs.  We have also seen the rise of micro mobility solutions, these things like E‑scooters, E‑bikes, if you want to, we can include transit network companies.  And like many things in my presentation, those options present opportunity and problems for the disability community.  So something like an E‑scooter for someone who has balance and is, you know, ambulatory but who is disconnected from public transit and who also experienced fatigue, an E‑scooter can be an amazing tool to get to and from work, to and from school and beyond.  At the same time, folks leaving them in the middle of sidewalks, are cutting off curb cuts, they are a huge barrier to chair users.  So, in addition to making sure that local transit systems get the funding they need to survive we also need to be making sure that all of these new kind of hybrid transit tech companies have regulations that are strong enough to make sure that they are fulfilling their potential and promise to the disability community without causing harm or creating further barriers.
>> Thank you.  This next question comes with a statement beforehand, it's short.  I feel the current hiring practices are already discriminatory due to the fact that some applications have limited time on applying and the various tests provided, have there been any lawsuits about this?
>> MARIA TOWN:  So, there ‑‑ there have certainly been lawsuits about employment‑based hiring tests, and timed tests.  I can't speak to any off the top of my head.  But there have certainly been lawsuits when it comes to these algorithmic hiring tools specifically, I am not sure, I think that's a new area that we would really have to look into.  They are likely has been fewer lawsuits specifically related to that.  I also ‑‑ again, in a traditional hiring context, we would know like, you know, contact this E‑mail address or this person to receive an accommodation which may be extended time on a test.  But how do you do that when you are working entirely with tech‑based tools.  And how ‑‑ if you are able to request more time on your test, how does this algorithmic hiring tool incorporate that piece of data.  Right?  Me asking for more time on a test because I don't have great mouse skills, is that piece of data incorporated into the algorithm that disfavors me as a disabled employees; that's the big question.
>> So, I think we have time for about two more questions.  We have about six minutes left.  The next question is:  Are there any immediate research or data needs related to the various disability and employment issues you discussed.  Especially in relation to the use of hiring algorithms and a shift to telework.
>> MARIA TOWN:  Yes.  So, in ‑‑ Bob, thank you for that question.  In terms of the research needs, I think there are quite a few.  And I think there are specifically research translation needs that exist around the potential pitfalls of algorithmic hiring tools and disability discrimination.  There is a lot of work happening with big law firms on the issue or big consulting companies like Accenture, and that's all well and good, they are, they are creating these AI frameworks that incorporate disabilities.  But how is a location rehabilitation counselor going to access that information and explain that to their consumers or their clients.
Is this information available in plain language or ways that like, for example, young people with disabilities could understand as they enter the workforce.  I think there are some key research translation needs.  On the research itself.  I think part of the issue is actually figuring out what is possible.  Many large employers are already using these algorithmic hiring tools.  And I don't know if it would be at all possible to work with some of them to figure out what kinds of things they have done to eliminate or prevent disability bias among other forms of bias, that would be a really, a really interesting research question.  And then around telework, I saw someone say, Amy, says telecommuting needs to be the choice of the employee and not a requirement of the employer.  I totally agree.  My concern comes with more and more employers shifting to either an entirely virtual work space or very limited in‑person work space.  Employers may just automatically require telework as a ‑‑ as part of the nature of employment.  And I think we all need to be cognizant of what that might do for community integration of disabled people as a whole.  And I don't know ‑‑ I don't know how we would necessarily research that or how we would bring the research questions but I would love to talk with any one of you who is working on that.
>> Okay.  I think we will wrap up with this last question which is pretty short, I guess.  On the slide regarding COVID and disability employment concerns what is the source of these statistics, and would you be comfortable sharing them with us?
>> MARIA TOWN:  Yes.  The source of the statistics is Department of Labor's Office of Disability employment policy as well as the American Community Survey and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  And I can send those resources to Linea and Mark and I think they can send them out to all attendees.
>> Perfect.  Thank you so much.  With that, we conclude our question and answer, and I will turn it back over to Kurt for a final word.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Thank you Maria, for taking the time to be with us today and sharing the wonderful presentation.  I will just mention that those algorithmic hiring practices on a fundamental basis freeze out our clients in our employment program with developmental disabilities who are using supported employment from applying for a number of jobs.  So, I am really pleased to see your focus on that.  I realize in my introduction I failed to mention, although you Maria did, that we have a whole team behind us today.  And that they include Kim Canaan who just managed our question and answer.  Linea Johnson, who many of you communicate with who is on our team and Fiona, and we appreciate them greatly.  And Mark Harniss is lurking, because of the issue with a family member where he is in an area of rural Washington without adequate Internet access, he can't be on the screen, but he is chiming in.  So with that, we will take a 15‑minute break and a countdown timer will appear on your screen.  And with that, we will see you all in 15 minutes, thank you.   
(Short recess taken.)

(Short recess taken.)

>> KURT JOHNSON:  Welcome back everyone.  We saved about a minute on this last presentation, so I am sure I will find a place to use that later.  It's now time for our five research presentations related to employment and economic self‑sufficiency.  Each presentation will last 15 minutes.  As a reminder, after the final presentation, we'll have a 20‑minute question‑and‑answer period.  And we encourage you to go ahead and submit questions as you go using the question‑and‑answer feature.  And then we will handle them as we did during the last presentation once all of the five research presentations are completed.  To start us off, I'd like to welcome Jill Bezyak and Emily Shuman from the Rocky Mountain ADA Center.  They will be discussing their research on disability and implicit bias.
>> DR. JILL BEZYAK:  Thanks Kurt.  As Kurt mentioned, my name is Dr. Jill Bezyak.  I am a professor at the University of Northern Colorado.  I also serve as the principal investigator at the Rocky Mountain ADA Center.  I am a Caucasian female with a fair complexion.  I have long, strawberry‑blonde hair.  I am wearing glasses and a black blazer today.  So, as Kurt mentioned, we are going to talk to you about a study involving disability and implicit bias.  So, as you think about this if implicit bias isn't a concept that you are terribly familiar with it.  Think of it as the bias that you don't know you have.  And we all have it.  You know, it can extend to various areas including, you know, race, religion, politics, disability.  So that's what we are going to be talking about a little today.  Next slide, please.  Okay.  So, a little background on this topic as we begin.  We all know, and we heard from Maria, that employment opportunities for people with disabilities are very limited.  And there are barriers, many barriers that get in the way of participation in employment for folks with disabilities.  One of the largest barriers, is negative attitudes and stigma.  That not only gets in the way of employment opportunities, but it influences housing and full community participation.  And it's something that we have known about for years and attempted to target in many different ways.  So, implicit bias has been something of great importance at the Rocky Mountain ADA Center and of interest for many years.  So, we decided to begin to investigate, you know, the topic of stigma and attitudes, negative attitudes.  It's through a slightly different lens by looking at implicit bias.  So, that's what our research study is all about.  We have two basic research questions that have guided us through this study.  The first which is devoted to the first half of our research project, is what are the effects of demographic characteristics on implicit bias towards individuals with disabilities.  And the second is:  What are the effects of implicit bias training on the attitudes of human resource professionals and employers towards individuals with disabilities?  And I will explain a little bit about what that means on the next slide, please.
So how we started this project is we worked closely with Project Implicit, and they are a group out of Harvard.  They have been collecting data on implicit bias for many years.  And it's ‑‑ they collect data on implicit bias towards all sorts of different things.  Like I mentioned earlier, politics, religion, race, age, and disability.  And there is a tool that they use to collect this data, which is called the Implicit Association Test.  And there is a specific one for disability referred to as the Disability Implicit Association Test.  So what we did in working with Project Implicit was to use preexisting data, that they had already collected, essentially to see if we could see trends in the data.  What do we already know about implicit bias towards people with disabilities.  What characteristics or preferences are already out there.  If you haven't looked at Project Implicit's website it's provided on this slide, and it ‑‑ you can go and learn more about the background of the study and the mission of the project.  You can also take various measures of implicit bias, you know, at your leisure.  They are interesting, and if you haven't done so you will be surprised at exactly how the tool measures implicit bias.  So, that was our first stage of the project.  Our second, we created an implicit bias training at the Rocky Mountain ADA Center.  At the start of this training we use the Implicit Association Test.  So, before participants even heard anything about the topic, they completed the Disability Implicit Association Test.  Kind of ‑‑ it got the wheels turning about the topic and, you know, starting to pay attention to a little ‑‑ a little bit more.  Following the completion of the Implicit Association Test, they also completed more explicit measures of stigma.  And so, these are measures where folks know that stigma is being assessed, right?  There is questions about employer stigma, acceptance of people with disabilities in the workplace, recruitment of folks with disabilities, and intention to hire before, so those measures were done before the training and they were also done immediately following the training.  So that gives you a little context as to what happened.  And now I am going to turn it over to my colleague Emily Shuman.  Next slide, please.
>> EMILY SHUMAN:  All right.  Thank you, Jill.  And once again, my name is Emily Shuman, and I am the project director at the Rocky Mountain ADA Center.  I use she/her pronouns.  And to describe myself, I am a fair‑skinned Caucasian woman with curled shoulder‑length brown hair, wearing a blue shirt against an office background.  So, as Jill mentioned, part of this research included implicit bias training which incorporated the Implicit Association Test.  The training was developed with the help of the Rocky Mountain ADA Center's instructional designer, as well as inputs from various other sources.  And initially the training was conducted exclusively in person but now we offer it online through our learning management system our RRLMS as well.  As far as the course structure, it's broken down into four main objectives.  First, learners understand how societal and cultural identity shapes our perceptions of the world around us and our attitudes towards others, which in turn influences bias.  Second, we define implicit bias and understand its impact on the lives of people with disabilities.  Third, participants learn about the different types of implicit bias, understanding that all unconscious biases fall into five distinct categories, which are:  Decision making bias, belief bias, behavioral bias, social bias, and memory errors and bias.  And finally, number four, learners discover strategies for mitigating bias in employment situations.  So, we present them with a range of practical solutions to bias mitigation.  Next slide, please.  On to the research findings.  Initially we examined preexisting data from Project Implicit, which indicate men over 55 without disability and people without a disability who are politically conservative and religious have higher automatic preferences for individuals without disabilities.  In the data we collected over 300 individuals completed the implicit bias training and a hundred eighty of those people were in hiring or management positions, such as HR staff, supervisors, and so forth.  We found with this group, the highest in this group those ‑‑ excuse me.  What we found with this group is that high levels of employment stigma are related to negative attitudes toward disability; in addition, negative attitudes are related to decreased support of recruitment efforts and decreased intention of hiring people with disabilities.  So, in other words, where folks in hiring or management positions have high levels of bias against people with disabilities, they are unlikely to get behind hiring, retaining and/or promoting people with disabilities.
Next slide, please.
There are a couple of important ‑‑ a couple of important things we can learn from these findings.  First, these results provide clear support for the use of implicit association measures to assess latent attitudes towards people with and without disabilities.  Since we can see a clear correlation between attitudes and outcomes for people with disabilities.  Second, we understand that tailored interventions directed at specific areas of concern for employers may be the most beneficial.  So, for example, targeting recruitment practices, and how implicit bias mitigation measures can be implemented targeted to those practices, to ensure equal opportunity for people with disabilities.  Next slide, please.
So, finally our next steps for this research are to continue development of online training, and that will more carefully target implicit bias and will be extended to additional populations outside of employment.  Additionally, we plan to use increasingly sensitive outcomes measures in order to assess improvements and changes over time.  And we will investigate the use of a 3‑month follow‑up assessment and whether that may provide an indication of change in a person's implicit bias itself.  So, that concludes our presentation on our disability and implicit bias research project.  We thank you so much to everyone who is here today and we look forward to taking your questions after the research presentation.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Thank you so much Jill and Emily.  We really appreciate it.  Just a reminder, if you have questions about the implementation of the ADA as it relates to your rights or your responsibilities under the law, you can call the ADA Network at 1‑800‑949‑4232.  And you can access information about the ADA and learn about your regional center on our national website WWW.ADATA.org.  Now, we will move ahead to a presentation from the Ann Deschamps and Ellen Fabian with the Mid‑Atlantic ADA Center.  I believe Ellen that you are starting this?
>> ELLEN FABIAN:  Yes, that's correct.
>> KURT JOHNSON:  Go ahead then.
>> ELLEN FABIAN:  Okay.  Thank you, Kurt.  And hello everybody, it's good to be here.  I am here in a home office.  My name is Ellen Fabian.  I am a Caucasian, middle‑aged female, with long brown hair.  And I have a flowered shirt on today.  So, pleased to see everybody.  Just a little background on me.  I am a professor at the University of Maryland, and also the co‑director of the ‑‑ of our Center on Transition and Career Innovation at the University of Maryland.  So, this is a study that myself and my colleague Ann Deschamps, who is with the Mid‑Atlantic ADA Center wanted to present today called, The road to work:  Youth with disabilities and their views on employment and the ADA.  I will be starting off the discussion or the presentation and then I will turn it over to my colleague Anne.  So, next slide.
Thought I would start with just giving a little bit of context and background on the study.  The slide says:  What is the current context of competitive integrated employment and youth with disabilities.  So, I just want to set the stage a little bit.  As you probably all know, laws such as the ADA and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act were enacted to improve access and opportunity to jobs for all people with disabilities.  And WIOA has special provisions for youth which really highlighted the federal policy and federal intent to increase employment access and opportunity during a key developmental stage for adolescents and youth with disabilities.  However, despite these laws, decades of studies and reports as our keynote speaker was noting show that labor force participation rates, that is access to jobs and involvement in the labor market among youth with disabilities has lagged far behind that of their peers without disabilities for a number of reasons; such as, fewer options during adolescence for work experiences, less job exploration or career development activities, and of course, attitudes of employers regarding capacity to work.  Of course, COVID only made some of those disparities in employment for these youth even worse compared to their peers.  Although, employment, of course, is a result of the economic recession was down across the board but it's still noteworthy that data out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in early 2021 showed a 30‑percentage‑point disparity between labor force participation among youth with disabilities aged about 20 to 24 compared to their peers without disabilities.  And, again, the reasons were probably lack of access to community providers who facilitated work opportunities, transportation issues, and of course the economic fallout from the pandemic.  One more background context that I want to address before I get into the purpose of this study was that in terms of the ADA and the extent to which job seekers or employees with disabilities invoke their rights under Title I to employment access and opportunity, most of the literature has shown a reluctance to do so.  For youth, particularly those with non‑apparent disabilities and those particularly who haven't had the opportunity or who haven't ‑‑ who have poor self advocacy skills are even less likely to request or receive workplace accommodations that would facilitate both job entry and job maintenance.  So, these studies in Andy's data were the driving force between our wanting a dig a little bit deeper and get a sense from a cross‑section of youth geographically and demographically as to their perceptions of the barriers and facilitators to employment, as well as some idea about their reliance on ADA Title I rights.  Next slide.
So, the purpose of our qualitative focus groups study was really to listen to the voices of a cross‑section of youth with disabilities in order to learn more for them about their perceptions about their experiences with the Americans with Disabilities Act, their knowledge of it, and their experiences with the challenges and facilitators to employment.  To do this, we conducted five focus groups in three different states, with a sample of youth representing a cross‑section of disabilities.  52% of the youth who were participants in our focus groups were from minority backgrounds, and the majority of these youth had reported with intellectual and developmental disabilities.  We had 42 youth participants.  Youth that were recruited from a number of sources in our focus groups, this was pre‑COVID so our focus groups were conducted face‑to‑face across a number of the settings which included local education agencies, ILCs, and well as other community ‑‑ other community settings.  Youth who were recruited to participate were screened by our research team and then invited to participate in the focus groups.  Next slide.
Each focus group had two facilitators from the research team, consisting of myself, Ann Deschamps, and two of our graduate students.  Each of the focus groups that we conducted was about 60 to 90 minutes long.  The focus group protocol consisted of 9 questions, and these included items such as:  Do you know what the ADA is?  What is your understanding of a workplace accommodation?  What is your experience with the challenges in getting a job or finding a job?  And what are your experiences, if any, in requesting workplace accommodations?  All of the youth participants in the focus group received a $25 gift card at the conclusion.  And there were also, because of the age of our participants, plenty of snacks provided during the 90‑minute period.  Now, with the next slide, I am going to turn over the presentation to my colleague Ann Deschamps.
>> ANN DESCHAMPS:  Thank you so much, Ellen.  Good day everybody.  My name is Ann Deschamps.  I am a Caucasian female in my 50s with shoulder‑length brown hair and glasses.  And I am wearing a floral sweater today.  I am the director of the Mid‑Atlantic ADA Center, which is a project of Transcen.  And for those of you who don't know Transcen, the mission of Transcen is meaningful work and community inclusion for people with disabilities.  I am really excited to talk about the findings of our study.  So, after going through pages and pages of focus group transcripts, we pulled out five different themes, and another interesting finding beyond the themes.  And we characterized these themes into barriers to employment, or supports and facilitators of employment.  And what I think is becoming a theme this morning or the ‑‑ or today is that our first barrier with stigma.  And the youth said unequivocally that they felt that employers had a negative attitude about disabilities, and particularly had negative attitudes and associated stigmas with mental health disabilities.  The second barrier was the disability itself.  And in a lot of cases the youth reported that the disability itself created performance issues but they were reluctant to request the supports or accommodations because either they didn't know they could request accommodations, they weren't familiar with the ADA and that they were able to request accommodations, or they didn't want to, they didn't want to call attention to themselves in that way.  The third barrier was interesting.  It was anxiety.  And this specifically was not necessarily anxiety related to a person's disability condition which it could have been.  But it was more the youth talking about anxiety with job interviews, anxiety during job interviews or on the job when there are difficult situations.  And the other really interesting finding was that the youth were ‑‑ found it much easier to request accommodations in postsecondary education settings than they did asking for support in workplace settings.  Okay.  On to the supports and facilitators.  So, we found that the youth reported that when they did have coworkers or supervisor who stepped in and helped out whether it was a formal accommodation under the ADA or not, that it was very helpful to ensure that they maintain their job and were successful in employment.  In addition, their self management behaviors, their ability to learn how to cope with their anxiety and the stress at work, were very helpful in maintaining employment.  And, again, workplace accommodations which fell into the same category as the coworker, supervisor who stepped in, so formal accommodations and informal that weren't necessarily known as accommodations.  Next slide, please.
So what can we learn from these findings?  Well, one of the main things that we can learn is how critical it is to pair information about the Americans with Disabilities Act with information about the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.  So when we are educating parents, teachers, people with disabilities about the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act we need to work in the information about the Americans with Disabilities Act too and ensure that they understand that this is the civil rights law and the difference between entitlement and eligibility.  In addition, as we have been talking about in the field of transition for the last 30 years, we have to emphasize self advocacy training especially during secondary school years.  And our study really put a spotlight on the need to focus on workplace accommodations.  One of the things that ‑‑ one of the extra things that we discovered is that the youth did not know about the Americans with Disabilities Act and the youth that did know about the ADA, they knew that the ADA stood for the Americans with Disabilities Act, they didn't know what it said.  They knew it had something to do with disabilities.  They certainly didn't know about the accommodation provisions too.  So this really focuses on the need to teach youth while they are still in school about accommodations and what accommodations would work for them in the workplace.  And finally, but certainly not least, is how important it is that the messages about the ADA and the messengers and methods get to everybody, particularly traditionally underserved populations.  It's so important that we make the conscious effort to reach out to youth from racial and ethnic minority groups who traditionally have not gotten information about the ADA.  Next slide, please.  Wrapping things up here, next steps to strengthen the study's findings.  It would be wonderful if we could see if there could be a number of pilot intervention that could be tried out.  What practices are most effective in ensuring that youth learn about the accommodations in the workplace.  And youth learn about their rights under the ADA.  There is tons of curriculum out there now, and there is lots of information and experimenting with different interventions using rigorous research methods to ensure will help us hone in on what is the most effective.  And then we can work at getting that into the schools, and into providers' hands and parents' hands to ensure youth are educated.  Finally, we can also look at conducting research on employer's side of things and looking at what constitutes success in the workplace according to employers for youth with disabilities and successful accommodations, and get that perspective on it too.  If you would like more information I am really excited to tell you that we have an article coming out in the Journal of Rehabilitation Research Policy and Education volume number 35, the next issue that will be out about this study.  And I ‑‑ having said that, I think our time is up.  And I will turn it back over to Kurt.  And thanks again to everybody who organized it and to all of you participants who are here.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Thank you so much Ellen and Ann.  We really appreciate it.  We are going to move on now to Dr. Phil Rumrill at the University of Kentucky.  Phil will talk with us about what ‑‑ his research on workplace discrimination.  So, Phil, take it away.
>> Phil, I am going to interrupt, looks like you are muted, sir.  If you would like to start over and unmute yourself that would be fabulous.
>> KURT JOHNSON: So, it looks like maybe Phil isn't with us right now.
>> This is Mark.  Phil is here.  Phil, I believe it's star 6 to unmute.
It looks like he is gone now, so maybe he is dialing back in.  Let's give him just one minute.
>> Hi, it looks like ‑‑ this is Linea.  It looks like Phil is unable to unmute right now, so he is wondering if we could go to the next session and then come back to him.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Yeah, I think that's an excellent idea.  So, that means that we will see if Vicki Chang and Sarah von Schrader from the Northeast ADA Center can begin their presentation early.  Sarah, will that work for you all? 
>> SARAH VON SCHRADER:  Sure.  You bet.
>> KURT JOHNSON:  Excellent.  Go for it.
>> SARAH VON SCHRADER:  Okay.  So I am Sarah von Schrader.  I am a white female with brown hair.  I am wearing a green dress.  I am part of the Northeast ADA Center research team, and also the associate director of research at Cornell University.  So for the last four years, our Northeast ADA Center have focused our research efforts on small businesses and their implementation of Title I of the ADA.  We understood from past research that we have done and others have done that small business information needs around the ADA and disability employment were different than for their larger counterparts.  So, in order to support this group, we wanted to conduct some research and to design tools that would really meet the needs of small employers.  So, what do we want to know?  We developed a set of research questions and a hypotheses that guided our work.  And a basic summary of what we wanted to learn were first:  What are the barriers to Title I implementation in small businesses.  This was to guide the development of the content that we would made accessible through the tool we were developing.  And second:  How do small businesses access information to support their work.  Either specific to the ADA or more generally.  We found that many of the small businesses we spoke to weren't regularly accessing information about the ADA.  This was to support our approach to packaging the information that we were learning to support small businesses.  And so, as we worked on addressing these questions, it helped us think about how we can best design a tool the businesses will access and that will be as relevant and useful as possible.  Next slide.  So this is a diagram that shows our phased approach to the research.  The first phase we conducted research which I will describe in a little more detail.  And then we moved into toolkit development.  We are now currently in Phase 3 and testing and refining our tool.  And we will be actually also disseminating the tool that's publicly available.  So, I will start back with research.  We started with literature review on small businesses and ADA implementation.  We did analyses of labor statistics, small business statistics.  We were able to look at EEOC discrimination charge data and look at that by employer size, to see if there were particular issues arising more commonly.  We developed an interim report, and that work helped refine our research questions as well as our mixed method approach.  That approach included interviews with small employer representatives followed by a survey to sort of confirm what we were learning through our interviews.  Did a total of 14 interviews, had about 300 respondents to our survey.  So, the next step was working with our Northeast ADA Center team on the development of the toolkit.  We are currently testing and refining the tool.  We are doing user testing and we are doing interviews with small business representatives.  And the tool is currently available.  My colleague Vicki, who I am going to turn it over to right now, is going to walk us through some of the research and as well as the tool we developed.
>> VICKI CHANG:  Thank you Sarah.  My name is Vicki Chang and I am a research associate from the Northeast ADA Center.  And to describe myself, I am an Asian female, wearing a black blouse today.  So, first, we wanted to understand what are the barriers to effective implementation of Title I of the ADA among small employers.  We know from previous research that areas around disability inclusion fell into three categories.  So, first are things that businesses tend to do because of lack of appropriate system.  Second, things that they don't know how to do because lack of knowledge.  And third, things that they wouldn't do because of culture.  So, those barriers were also mirrored in our study.  So in both of our survey in interviews we found that small business employers experienced many gray areas when they talk about implementing workplace accommodations.  Particularly as a result of workplace culture, lack of understanding, knowledge and systems support.  So, we heard a lot of this ‑‑ sorry, can we go back to the last slide, please?  Thank you.  So we heard a lot of this idea of family life culture as small business workplace.  Often comments like:  We are like family, we just want to help each other.  But they become concerned when employees request becomes more demanding.  So let me give you a scenario that we heard in our interview.  This is a shared story.  In the story the employee made a request of an accommodation, which is a specialized chair.  When the employer provide the accommodation, the employees refused because this is not exactly the chair that was requested, the employee wanted a more expensive, more stable, higher quality chair.  So, then the employer didn't know what to do.  Think about this story, it's like when you are 15, you ask your dad for a car.  You are envisioning a Corvette, but he give you an old station wagon.  Well, the old station wagon works, but it's not exactly the fancy solution you were thinking of, right?  So you see there is this like mismatch on expectations.  Also there is a danger of conceptualizing business environment with family.  Family is kind of stuck with each other.  And this is simply not the case for a business.  Often employment is well so when an employee gets troublesome there is no obligation to keep them around.  And it is clear that there is lack of knowledge and clear policy and process around accommodation for small business.  Which would result in employers kind of taking stock in this endless negotiation cycle.  In interviews we heard a lot of what ifs.  And our survey results told us there is a lot of don't knows.  We also learned that disability policy exists in small businesses.  Yay!  That's a good sign.  But often when we learn more it's just a line or paragraph within their employee's handbook which is just not enough.  They need more support in developing procedures.  When the policy process outline is more clearly, like how you work together to identify something that works, maybe not the Corvette, but effective solution, having this clear process in place is important so employees and employers can be on the same page and share the same set of expectation.  Okay.  So next slide, please.
So, small business we interviewed in the qualitative portion of the study, they already understand what we meant when we asked them about the disability.  They would say they didn't have employees with disability or didn't make accommodations.  This is the response even coming from HR who are in a position for probably 20 to 30 years.  So, we had to find a way to tell people what these basic concepts mean when ‑‑ for our survey portion of the study before they can accurately self report in the survey.  So, our original thought was maybe building like couple lines of definition text in the beginning of the survey or make a video of it.  But then thinking people probably skip those lines and jump into the survey or ‑‑ and people probably won't want to watch a video when they are already spending time on responding to a survey.  So, then this comic was born.  These comics were innovative solutions for us to solve those definitional problems.  And here you see this is one of the comics that we created.  So, here, this is a comic on what is the disability.  Here you see there are two office workers.  And one is the owner in blue, this guy is the small business owner.  The other person in orange, the woman works in the HR.  And the owner only knows that ADA applies to small businesses but doesn't really know what that means.  So, the HR told the owner how disability is defined under the ADA in plain language which helps the owner to reflect more on his employees who might be covered under the ADA.  And as a result of our study majority of ‑‑ majority of our service participants told us that they found the comic helpful in explaining disability and accommodation, which helps them to move forward to respond to survey questions.  Thank you next slide, please.  In our study we also want to understand how does small business learn about and incorporate the information about ADA into their work.  And both survey and interviews share the findings in that employers basically in small business they just use everything that they can get to find information to guide their accommodation process.  Often they have to spend a lot of time kind of sorting through random and non‑vetted information.  Or they reach out to somebody that they know, maybe works with ADA, for that information if they are lucky.  So, the most common way to access information about the ADA was through Google.  So, they might just be looking what comes up first, and spend a lot of time understanding the jargon.  Next slide, please.  Okay.  So, the goal for our study is to develop a tool that supports small business employers.  But how can we translate the research into a usable tool for employers.  Well, in order for us to build a practical tool for the employers to use we have to synthesize all of the information we learn from our study in total.  So, based on what we learn from the time the ‑‑ those employers have, which is not a lot, right?  Because there is often one person wears multiple hats in small businesses.  So the tool is also developed with the understanding of their knowledge level, information needs and ways to absorb the information.  So here is a screen shot of the first page of the online tool.  First, we know they don't have a lot of time already according to our study, and that they go to random resources for information.  So, we envision this tool is a centralized information tool where it is one stop for employers to get to the information.  There are currently a ‑‑ a toolkit, within each tool there are four sections.  So, the playbook provides information on the topic.  Situation room provides scenarios that help people to practice the information.  What to do section is a mini guide that summarizes key points.  And the last one is deep dive, it includes additional learning from recommended resources.  So, all of the topics you see here in content were selected based on the needs of small employers.  And we also add a tool on coronavirus early last year to support small businesses.  Next slide, please.  Here is the screen shot of some content from the playbook section.  In the toolkits we use plain language and try to remove jargon or include sections that explain terms that are important and needed to be understood.  We also create micro content to impact learning, knowing the information is presented in short segments it's easier for mental digestion.  Next slide.  Thank you.  So here is a screen shot of one of the scenario rooms.  So we made information relevant by including realistic case examples.  Learning by examples is one of the useful strategies we hear a lot and highlighted multiple times by small business employers during our study.  So, this section does not end with the case study, it also includes concrete solutions to address each case scenarios.  It has a quick summary for readers to take away.  So, you can see all of the content are created with practical information and they are direct to the point.  Next slide.  Here we have a quote by a Japanese playwright which captures our work.  That the goal for us to develop this toolkit is trying to make difficult things simple, simple things interesting and interesting things meaningful.  And like Sarah mentioned, we are currently conducting user testing.  And here is one of the quotes from our users that he had told us, this is the tool that provides employee response to the questions that they search for and that it is the most accessible, comprehensive, easy to navigate and engaging tool, which will become a go‑to resource for them moving forward.  This is a very encouraging comment, which is very similar to many useful feedback that we have gotten.  Next slide, please.  So, here are the ‑‑ here are the following next steps.  Of course there are still improvements needed for the toolkit, for example we still need to improve the clarity on the instruction page and our legend labeling.  We will continue to conduct user data, updated toolkits and prepare for dissemination.  Here we also include a link to small business work toolkits, if you would like to check it out.  And here concludes our presentation.  Thank you so much for listening.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Thank you guys so much.  We really appreciate it, that's great.  And I know this represents ongoing work.  I think we have got Phil on, the technical issues with Phil Rumrill fixed.  Phil, let's pass it to you for your presentation.
>> PHIL RUMRILL:  Hey it worked out, Tom.  Thank you Dr. Johnson.  Can you hear me?
>> KURT JOHNSON: Yep.  You sound great.
>> PHIL RUMRILL:  Excellent, excellent.  Well, Kurt has been a friend and mentor to me for many, many years, so I don't mind Kurt that you demoted me from the panel before you even heard my remarks but I am glad that you promoted me up to this status where I can have the chance to talk with everybody so ‑‑ I am just having fun with you Kurt.  Thanks for having me today and good afternoon ‑‑ it's afternoon here in the east ‑‑ to everyone.
I am Phil Rumrill.  I am a professor of counselor education and director of research and training at the Human Development Institute at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.  I am a Caucasian male, 52 years old, calling in by phone, but visual image, what little hair I do have is gray and brown.  Mostly gray I am told.  I am wearing a black University of Arkansas T‑shirt with red letters.  It's a great honor and privilege to be here with my distinguished colleagues on this panel.  And thanks to my friends in Cornell for allowing me to go out of order.  I do apologize for the technical difficulty that probably came from me phoning in.  Thanks for your indulgence.  Happy to talk with you today about the current status and ongoing projects of our National Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Americans with Disabilities Act Research Project.  We call it NEARP, it's a lousy acronym.  It takes less time than to say the entire initiative.  And could we go from the title slide to the next slide, please.  Thank you.  Long before COVID‑19 NEARP began in 2003 at Virginia Commonwealth University as a public health research community of practice.  One that perceived and continues to perceive workplace discrimination against people with disabilities as an insidious and un‑American virus.  So we apply public health and even epidemiological principles in this research endeavor.  And given the health and other life outcome disparities between unemployed and employed people, and given the still disappointingly low rate of labor force participation among people with disabilities that my colleagues on the panel have already noted, we view the employment of people with disabilities as a major public health concern.  I am sure we don't ‑‑ wouldn't have much disagreement among attendees of this conference in that regard.  We also believe that the disability community, the American economy, and American society as a whole is healthier when people with disabilities engage in employment.  And workplace discrimination is a longstanding and well documented threat to labor force participation for people with disabilities; and therefore, it is a threat to overall public health.  And as with any virus or public health condition, in order to eliminate the threat of workplace discrimination against people with disabilities, we need to study it.  We need to understand its etiology, its symptom, how it spreads, how it can be prevented and redressed and protective and prohibiting factors that facilitate or impede its growth and consider its overall impact.  Go to the next slide please.  Thank you.
So we will tell you a little bit about the NEARP collaborative.  As I mentioned, we have been operating since 2003.  We use the United States EEOC ‑‑ Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or EEOC's integrated mission system database, and we will talk about that here in just a moment.  Over the course of that time in collaboration with a large number of people we have published 97 different empirical studies out of this database, either in print or in press.  We have had 100 ‑‑ 101 different co‑authors from 25 different universities in the United States and abroad.  We have been proud to sponsor 12 doctoral dissertations since the inception of the project that's been a really gratifying part of this endeavor.  We have had a few million‑dollars ‑‑ about 6 million actually ‑‑ in extramural grant funds and currently the project is being operated under the University of Kentucky Human Development Institute, in collaboration with the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, and currently with funding from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.  Next slide, please.  I talked about the database that we use.  And we ‑‑ since mid 1992 to the end of calendar year 2020, there have been about a little over 1.1 million unique and closed allegations of discrimination under Title I of the ADA and the ADA Amendments Act which took effect in 2009 that have been received and filed ‑‑ received and investigated and closed by the EEOC.  And those all are comprised within the database.  We have 28 and a half years of data that we have access to.  Categories of data that we have in the fields, we have charging party characteristics.  This is the person who makes the allegation of workplace discrimination.  We have the age of the person in years.  We have gender.  We have race, ethnicity, as identified by that person.  We have impairment type.  And this is the impairment that is the basis for the allegation of discrimination.  Someone might have diabetes and a learning disability, but if learning disability is the basis for the alleged discriminatory conduct on the part of the employer, that person would show up in the database as a person with a learning disability.  Another set of fields that we have are issues.  We have 41 different actions that are prohibited under Title I of the ADA.  And we often categorize these in three categories having to do with job acquisition things like hiring, applications, interview procedures, postings, et cetera.  Working conditions which include the terms and conditions of employment, scheduling, benefits, things of that nature.  Harassment and intimidation we will talk about too in just a moment.  And then also job retention.  Discriminatory conduct that affects people's ability to continue in employment.  Discharge or firing.  Constructive discharge, which is creating an environment that is intolerable of such that the person chose to quit.  Access to promotion.  Provision of reasonable accommodations, et cetera.  So those are the 41 different issues, and you will see that only about 20 of them have some meaningful level of activity in the database which we will get to in just a moment.  We have employer characteristics including size of the employers, that would be the number of employees, the locations, state and region, although most of our analyses are done regionally to protect the confidentiality of the employer.  And industrial classification of the ‑‑ of the particular employer.  We also have data on the EEOC's resolution or determination as a result of the investigation of the allegation.  And we categorize these for most purposes into two categories:  Merit, favoring the charging party that discrimination actually did occur as per ADA regulations, and non‑merit allegations, those come down in favor of the employer and are a finding that discrimination allegation could not be verified.  Thank you.  Next slide.
Through this process NEARP researchers examine characteristics of employers and charging parties.  We look at differences in the discrimination experiences between and within impairment groups.  We look at the issues that I mentioned previously.  And their proportions and what types of allegations people are making.  We can look at predictors of merit case resolutions and of outcomes of the process.  And we do this quite often as well.  We also look at patterns in workplace discrimination over time.  I will go to the next slide, please.  This one begins I will give you some ‑‑ you know, these are ‑‑ got 8 here, we may not get to them all, 8 major findings and these are data from 2009, under the ADA Amendments Act, up through the end of 2020 some general trends and patterns.  Important finding number 1 the tsunami of allegations that was predicted by opponents of the ADA Amendments Act which was passed in 2008, took effect in 2009, really did not occur.  There has been increase in the total number of allegations slow and steady from 2009 on up.  But that pattern is very similar to those allegation patterns that we see under Title I of the Civil Rights Act, for example discrimination on the basis of other protected characteristics.  In fact, an employer who has 1,000 or more employees, that's only 2% of all employers, has a 1 in 4800 chance of being named in an ADA Title I allegation in any given year.  So, that will be ‑‑ we will go to the next slide.  I won't editorialize there, I will lay out as many of these as we can.  Important finding number 2, what we call the big five issues.  The five most commonly occurring allegations of discrimination comprise 84% of all allegation activity in the database that we have.  And the most common by considerable margin is discharge or unlawful firing at 34%.  Then you go to reasonable accommodations at 19%.  A lot of attention, and justifiably so, on hiring practices, but hiring is 11% of the overall allegations since 2009.  Terms and conditions of employment are similar at 10%.  And harassment and intimidation are also at around 10%.  So these five issues are 84% of the activities that we see in the database.  Next slide, please.  Important finding number 3.  Employers prevail at a 3 to 1 ratio in EEOC case resolutions.  The overall merit rate, that is the rate of findings that discrimination did occur, is 24% in the overall database.  The non‑merit obversely then is 76%.  And we find that people with hearing loss and visual impairments have some of the highest merit rates at 30%, and people with substance use disorders have the lowest rates of any impairment groups and that's at around 18%.  I will go on to the next one, please, important finding number 4.
This is just a slide, it doesn't have text under it, but we know that charging parties with intellectual disabilities with traumatic brain injuries, and hearing loss have the highest rates of harassment and intimidation allegations.  And so people whose disabilities affect their cognitive abilities and sometimes their communication abilities are subject to the highest rates of harassment and intimidation.  I don't know how you all feel about this, but this makes this phenomenon all the more insidious and perhaps that's not a strong enough word, despicable really.  We have an ongoing problem with harassment and intimidation particularly against folks with those conditions.  Important finding number 5, next slide, please.  People with substance use disorders and mental health conditions have the highest rates of discharge or firing allegations.  Next slide, please.  Important finding number 6.  People with speech impairment, burns, amputations and disfigurement.  Again, conditions that effect communication ability in one sense and appearance in another.  Talk about implicit bias, this is really explicit bias, I think.  These folks have the highest rates of allegations in the hiring process.
>> KURT JOHNSON:  Phil?
>> PHIL RUMRILL:  How are we doing on time, we about done? 
>> KURT JOHNSON:  We are about done.
>> PHIL RUMRILL:  Good.  I am going to go right to ‑‑ there are two others.  I am going to go to ‑‑ I am going to go to one other quickly Kurt and wrap it up from there; is that okay?
>> KURT JOHNSON: Yep. 
>> PHIL RUMRILL:  If we go to the next slide important finding number 7.  We have a finding here charging parties with chronic health conditions experience the highest rates of allegations in the area of reasonable accommodations.  Couple more other things just in closing here that I will not get to, we do have a slide that will be sent out to everybody that has our current and ongoing projects, my E‑mail is at the front of this, be happy to correspond with any or all of you afterwards.  I apologize for running over.  Thanks for your forbearance with the technical difficulties.  Appreciate your time and attention.  Kurt, that's all I got.  Thank you.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Thank you so much Phil for that presentation.  I know this represents a long running research that you have guys have been doing.  It's been very ‑‑ had a lot of impact.
>> PHIL RUMRILL:  Glad to be with you.  Thank you.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Let's move on now to Dr. Meera Adya and Barry Whaley from the Southeast ADA Center their work on understand and improving financial inclusion from the participatory action research.
>> BARRY WHALEY:  Thank you Kurt.  Appreciate it.  And although you may never be forgiven for having me go after Phil Rumrill, it's a very difficult act to follow.  I am Barry Whaley.  I am the director of the Southeast ADA Center.  I am Caucasian, white middle‑aged male with blond hair, glasses.  I am wearing a gray Polo shirt today.  Joining me today is Meera Adya.  Southeast ADA is project of the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University.  So the four principal researchers on our project were Meera Adya, myself, Pam Williamson and Michael Morris.  Next slide, please.  Before we go on, just to acknowledge that this research was funded by NIDILRR, the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research.  We thank them for their support.  So we are going to be talking about financial inclusion of people with disabilities.  And objective indicators and subjective experiences.  Before I go on I want to briefly mention those people who contributed to our project, they include Peter Blank, our principle investigator.  Our Southeast ADA Center affiliates and net admins.  Beth Harrison, our director of knowledge translation.  Mathew Ramsey and James Cartwright who were students from Morehouse College an HBCU in Atlanta.  We also had help from student researchers at Syracuse University, College of Law Annette Goodman, (inaudible) Mary and Marsha.  So, what did we want to know by this research?  We had three studies that we engaged in, looking at financial inclusion and financial exclusion for people with disabilities.  So, our first study, broadly speaking, was how are people with disabilities able to access and benefit from financial services offered by banks, credit unions, as well as alternative financial service providers?  This first study is an objective study, trying to understand financial inclusion.  This was a quantitative, structured assessment.  We developed a tool, that Meera will discuss, called the QI‑FIT, and this is an assessment tool to assess and improve financial institutions' accessibility, communications, financial services, and their programs.  Our second study, or as we refer to it as study B, the question is:  How does the financial service community engage in the local communities?  What barriers do people with disabilities face and those barriers that are unique or exacerbated because of disability.  So the second study is a subjective study to understand deeper ‑‑ more deeply financial inclusion.  It's qualitative study that relied on semi‑structured interviews to probe the experiences of people with disabilities who use both mainstream and alternative financial services across the Southeast.  Third study is a study of geographical availability.  It's a contextual study to understand financial inclusion, and what we plan to do with study C is spatial analysis of the locations of both mainstream and alternate financial services in selected communities in the Southeast to look at geographic accessibility.  And as an aside to that, Pam and I did some work with Peter a few years ago at Mississippi Valley State University and we were talking to the Dean of Students where he tells us that in order to conduct physical in‑person banking he had to drive from the Mississippi Delta to Atlanta to conduct his banking.  So, that's what we are looking at in that study C.  So, Meera, I am going to turn it over to you.
>> MEERA ADYA: Thank you Barry.  So, I will be focusing largely on our first study.  Barry ran through our program of research, three studies.  Today we will be talking about the first one, which is the development of the tool to look at financial inclusion, we call it the QI‑FIT.  QI for quality indicators, and FIT for financial inclusion tool.  Our goal was to understand the benchmarks of effective financial services provision from experts.  And then to take these benchmarks and create a standardized list of quality indicators that folks could use to determine if a given financial institution was meeting them.  Either the institution itself, community advocates and members, consumers, or others.  Our guiding principles were that experts are those providing the services and those using the services.  And as was mentioned our approach to research is participatory action, that means engaging stakeholders.  And these two groups of stakeholders were engaged from the conception of the research to the conduct of the research and now to the interpretation and dissemination of the research as well.  We believe this increases context, perspective and relevance.  And hopefully that will come through as we continue today.  Next slide, please.  In terms of the development of the tool that we used as the basis for our data collection we started by consulting literature, both research literature, practice literature, governmental and nongovernmental literature to determine what our standards, rubrics, recommendations, what are ideas that have been promulgated that could reflect benchmarks of importance.  We also worked with our stakeholder groups, who were part of our participatory action research team, to determine what they saw as important.  This created a very long, extensive list that had to be culled down and organized.  That was the second step of our research, to overlap ‑‑ to eliminate overlaps, to reframe and reword what we had as indicators that could be used into our tool, to sort them into categories and then rate their importance and utility.  And in particular, this was driven, again, all by our participatory action research group and our stakeholders who can then say this is what is of importance and priority.  Next slide please.  This resulted in a tool that had 8 categories, 48 indicators under those categories.  The first was strategy and internal leadership.  The second, accessibility in customer, support in communications.  The third, physical accessibility and customer support.  Fourth, traditionally delivered banking products and financial services.  The fifth, financial education and counseling.  The sixth, inclusion and disability relations group.  Some businesses call them affinity groups.  Seventh, inclusive community development.  And the final, 8, alternative credit scoring and lending.  Next slide, please.  Developing that tool took us a while.  Once we had it we were ready to proceed with looking at various financial institutions, and determining whether we could find information related to those indicators and what that would tell us.  We looked at 82 banks and credit unions websites across our 8‑state region.  We had two groups conducting data collection.  We had PAR teams that were identified in each state through the affiliate network of the center.  Individuals in the community were recruited who wanted to be researchers; they are not participant in a study they were researchers supporting the data collection.  We also had research assistance at Syracuse University, helping to assess the website.  Moving forward, and I will explain this in a bit, we will also have research assistants at Syracuse going to all of the bank websites, not just some but all of them, again, and using exactly the same keywords to search their websites.  Like I said, I will get right back to that.  Oh, if you could go back one more time, please.  Thank you.  In terms of the status of the project and process findings, what happened was some researchers found more information than others when they were searching the websites, PAR researchers found the experience incredibly valuable.  So, not only did they support the project but they thought the participation was meaningful for them individually and they had much good information for us in debriefing sessions.  I think unsurprising to many the banks were uncomfortable with site visits.  We made sure to reach out and ask for permission to come on site to collect information, perhaps speak with someone about what we could not find on the website.  And look at the physical environment.  But we most often did not receive that permission.  For this reason, and as I mentioned I will follow up with this, we had a focus group, a discussion group really, with individuals from the financial industry in the region.  And we asked them questions that we could not have asked individual banks.  Next slide, please.  In terms of our preliminary analyses, looking at just whether, could we find information related to the indicator or not, not judging or valuing what it is that we found, we created total scores for each of our 8 categories on the QI‑FIT.  And we examined whether the scores were higher looking at rural versus urban financial institutions and looking at banks versus credit unions.  Next slide, please.  So, our current findings demonstrate that there was variation in information found for 2 of our 8 categories.  The category of accessibility in customer support and communications, and the category of financial education and counseling.
Next slide, please.
In terms of accessible customer support and communications, we found that category was scored higher, which means there was more relevant information available when looking at rural financial institutions, as compared to urban ones.  And it was also higher, meaning more relevant information was available, for banks as opposed to credit unions.  For the category of financial education and counseling, we had a higher score or more relevant information available when looking at urban financial institutions as compared to rural ones.
And for credit unions as opposed to banks.
So, some may look at these findings and say this comports with their understanding of the nature of services that are provided by credit unions versus banks and the community relationships they try to develop, as well as for thinking about large institutions in urban settings as opposed to perhaps your more regionally‑focused, community‑focused rural settings, where you have a greater sense of community if individuals all know each other.  Next slide, please.  So, in thinking about what can we learn from the findings and from the study at large as we look back on it and think about what we found and what our experience was, we see that because these are public‑facing websites, the information about the institution's policies and practices for its employees, or sometimes its community engagement activities were difficult to determine.  So, some of the categories on our QI‑FIT tools really are those that need to be looked at in concert with someone from the institution.  It is hard to independently gain access to that information and determine if certain practices are happening or not.  In terms of that information about services and practices that are relevant to customers, information was certainly easier to find.  Local and regional banks often had limited information come compared to larger or national banks.  I think we see this across the board in the retail sector as well, for example, that might just be the resources that are available to build out a website or the priority that's put towards the website.  And this can seem obvious, but in discussions interpreting these findings amongst our team, we find that certainly local and regional banks seem to be offering personalization and community to their customers, but where there is a derth of information available for people with disabilities, who may have particular needs and are accessing their websites in advance, they are left with, you know, a paucity of information, and that in and of itself can be disenfranchising and create disparate information when they need certain information and can't find it.  Going forward, with net steps and what we can do with this research, we see this as a tool for the ADA TA centers, for financial institutions, and for consumers and advocates.  Certainly financial institutions can conduct a self assessment.  We are developing a financial services accessibility and inclusion online course.  We would hope to see that if assessments were conducted pre and post the course, post some time hence, that we would see an improvement in the number of benchmarks being addressed and addressed well by an institution once they have gone through the training and they understand the specific steps they can take to be more inclusive internally and externally.  And our long‑term outcomes connected to that certainly would be community advocacy for change, regulatory agency rules or settlement agreements with inaccessible institutions, and financial institutions' corporate culture changing to become more accessible.  Next slide, please.  In terms of next steps to strengthen the study's findings, this is again where I come back to those couple points I mentioned.  The participatory action process we used, it used the standardized QI‑FIT as the fundamental basis and structure for data collection, but PAR teams were able to use an organic process of looking for information on the website because each website will be structured differently.  Some information may be fairly evident from the categories that they provide to you that you can probe their website, and others maybe not.  Just to sort of button up nicely the data collection and say, when an absolutely consistent data collection process is used what do the findings look like.  We will have the student research assistants go back over all of the websites and do that.  The organic process is more externally valid, it has that mundane realism, if you will, when you look at what the process would be like for consumers in the real world.  So the current findings certainly have relevance and import in that direction.  And as mentioned institutions were uncomfortable about allowing site visits and discussions with staff at the local levels.  For that reasons, we had a discussion group with regional, I think some national financial industry representatives.  And we are analyzing the findings of that but certainly they do ‑‑ they certainly comport with some of our expectations and that is there are many things that these institutions are doing to be or become more accessible.  And some of them just aren't the kinds of steps that they may catalog on their public facing websites, so it's heartening to know that.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Meera, this is Kurt, we are about out of time.
>> MEERA ADYA:  I am all done.  Thank you.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Thank you so much.
Okay.  Thank you Meera and Barry so much for the presentation I know you guys have been working on this for quite a while.  And let's pass it to Kim who will facilitate our question and answer.
>> Kim:  All right, folks.  Thank you all so much.  Our first question is for Ellen and Ann of the Mid‑Atlantic ADA Center.  Was there any effort or data that differentiated the participants' level of anxiety in general compared to their feelings of anxiety in the workplace.
>> Ann:  I will go ahead and take that one.  No, there wasn't.  I think that's a really great idea though because the whole issue of anxiety is so nuanced.  And that would make a really interesting study in and of itself.  Especially to differentiate between when the anxiety was related to the disability and when the anxiety was just anxiety.  Not related to the disability.  Ellen, I don't know if you wanted to add anything to that.
>> No, I think that's good.  And certainly if you have pervasive anxiety being in a workplace situation where you think your disability may be salient, is only going to exacerbate it but it's a good question, thanks.
>> Kim:  All right.  Our next question is for Phil.  This comes from Oce Harrison of the New England ADA Center, I am sure we all love Oce.  Is there any explanation as to why people with substance abuse disorders have the lowest merit rate and the highest rates of firing?
>> Phil:  Well, Oce, thanks for your question.  Always great to hear from you.  I think it boils down to plain old, you know, stigma.  We know for a fact that employers have most reservations about hiring people with substance use disorders, particularly probably because of the behavioral attribution for the condition that we hold people responsible for their addiction in ways that we don't for other disabling conditions.  And so, I think ‑‑ I think there is ‑‑ and then in terms of the lower ‑‑ so that would explain the firing allegation.  We also have the Drug‑Free Workplace Act and other requirements that provide protections for employers who don't wish to tolerate active addiction in the workplace.  Around the lower rate of merit resolution, I think it speaks also, Oce, to just the myriad of responses to addiction and stigma you know in the workplace that people feel that they are being treated badly in all different ways on the basis of that.  Some of it doesn't rise to the level of discrimination.  Also, if you are an active addict to an illegal substance, for example, you don't have any protections under Title I of the ADA but you might go make an allegation anyway if you feel you have been treated poorly.  So there is some nuances with addiction, active addiction, addiction to legal versus illegal substances that probably would get at that.  We don't know the specific answer but those are things I would say off the top of my head.  Thank you.
>> Kim:  Thank you, Phil.  Our next question is again for Ellen and Ann.  Are there data available on the job titles that youth with disabilities find in employment?
>> Kurt:  I'm sorry Kim ‑‑ go ahead, Ann, yeah.
>> Ann:  Yeah.  The question is:  Are there data available about specific job titles for the youth with disabilities.  And we did not include that information.  We did ask whether they had experience working and in the focus groups they talked about their jobs.  But we did not collect specific information about the job titles that the youth had.
>> Kim:  All right.  Moving right along, our next question is for Jill and Emily of the Rocky Mountain ADA Center.  There is a little statement beforehand so I will read it for you:  It seems the research on employers' implicit bias is not completely surprising.  What was something that you found that surprised you about your research?
>> Yeah, that's a great question.  I think what surprised us in ‑‑ you know we had the opportunity to go out into the community pre COVID, and talk to people about implicit bias.  You know, about four and a half years ago we started.  And watching people learn about it, and watching the light bulbs go off, like you do in a classroom when students are really getting the information, was surprising ‑‑ surprising to some extent and heartening.  So, people didn't know a lot about it, especially at the beginning of this study.  And were open to learning about it and want to learn more.
>> Kim:  All right.  Thank you.  We ‑‑ looks like we have one last question.  This question was initially for the Mid‑Atlantic ADA Center, but we are willing to hear from any of you.  The question is:  Would any of you have resources for culturally competent ADA information?
>> I will go ahead and start, it was originally for us.  I think it just depends on what cultural ‑‑ what culture we are talking about.  I think all of the centers, since we are regionally based, have developed materials to meet the needs of the people that we serve.  And my colleague from the Region 2, the Northeast ADA Center, I know they serve Puerto Rico and have quite a few Spanish materials, and Wendy is gone she can address that.  Again, it depends which culture you are talking about.  In addition, I think another good resource for potentially culturally competent materials are local ‑‑ state and local disability organizations, protection and advocacy groups, human rights agencies that serves specific populations.  And they may or may not have developed some ADA information that is helpful.  I will go ahead and stop now and let my other directors talk.
>> Phil:  This is Phil.  This is a different type of resource, but I love Dr. Julie Smart's 2020 book:  Disability and diversity across the life span:  Caste disability in the broad context of diversity and culture that, you know, we think about disability sometimes as its own element and its own diversity and its own cultural implications and we look at disability, you know, in intersectionality and things like that.  And Dr. Smart's book gets at a lot of all of this.  It's not ADA specific but it's a great read.  We use it in our courses and I highly recommend it.  Disability and Diversity Across the Life Span.
>> Wendy:  This is Wendy Strobel Gower I will just say that like Ann said for all of our regions we have very specific populations, so a lot of our culturally competent material is related to people in Puerto Rico and it uses the language in terms that they use.  During the next cycle, however, all of the ADA Centers were instructed to work very hard to make additional culturally competent materials for all of the people in their regions so I think you will be seeing even more of that in the next cycle.  
>> Kim:  All right.  Thank you, Wendy.  Assuming that we are ‑‑ that no other presenter would like to discuss, I will turn it back over to Kurt, who will give us our final thought on the Q and A.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Thank you so much for the thoughtful questions.  We are working up to a 15‑minute break, and when we come back, we will have our final speaker, John Tschida, who's with the Association of University Centers on Disabilities, and a previous director of NIDILRR, and many other important policy positions that he has had over the years.  Let's start our break now and let's return in 20 minutes.  I'm sorry, 15 minutes.
(Short recess taken)
 
>> KURT JOHNSON: Welcome back from our break.
Again, I am very pleased that John Tschida has agreed to talk with us, to summarize what he heard this morning.  John is a ‑‑ one of the most proficient people in terms of disability policy that I know of, and I think is well versed in the research on ‑‑ and on current trends in disability policy and well positioned to give us his thoughts on this.  John, why don't you take it.
>> JOHN TSCHIDA:  Thank you Kurt, and thank you to all of our presenters for their important and informative contributions to the field.  As Kurt said, I am John Tschida, Executive Director of the Association of University Centers on Disabilities.  I am a Caucasian man, in my early 50s, with a full beard and glasses, wearing a blue‑and‑red stripe shirt with a navy blazer.  As Bezyak and Shuman noted in their presentation, the largest impediment to full inclusion of individuals with disabilities is the negative attitude towards individuals with disabilities.  Using the disability Implicit Association Test, they first asked:  What if any effects of demographic characteristics are implicit bias towards individuals with disabilities.  And found that men over 55, without a disability, and people without a disability, who are politically conservative and religious the automatic preferences is for individuals without disability.  They then asked:  What are the effects of implicit bias training on the attitudes of HR professionals and employers towards individuals with disabilities.  And engaged 300 individuals, 180 of whom were hiring management positions, found that high levels of employment stigma are related to negative attitude for disability, decreased support of recruitment efforts and decreased retention of hiring people with disabilities.  The results support the use of implicit association measures to assess latent attitude for people with and without disabilities. And help make the case for more tailored interventions directly addressed to employer concern.  
Next I will be targeting explicit bias and expanding training outside the employment context.  Hoping to use more sensitive outcome measures to assess improvements and change over time while considering both training assessments and look at changes in implicit bias.  Understanding the latent attitudes of other potential subpopulations they found demographics within the employment context could be useful and depending on the training results could also leave different more tailored training.  As the presenters noted understanding the change in implicit bias in training outcomes would also be helpful.  So would understanding the durability of those changes, if there is an opportunity to look at post training assessment over time.
In their qualitative studies Fabian and Deschamps used focus groups to understand the perceived employment challenges faced by transition‑age youth with diverse disabilities across multiple settings.  They noted previous research indicates this target population faced significant barriers entering the workforce.  Not enough is known about what interventions work or what obstacles exist based on disability type or specific context.  They also looked at not just the misunderstanding of but their use of their rights and responsibilities under the ADA.  For analyzing the data from the five focus groups across three states they uncovered a handful of themes characterized as barriers to facilitate employment, and found stigma as the primary barrier.  Specifically, that employers have a negative attitude about disability.  Are the barriers included the existence of the disability or health condition itself, which created performance issues but interviewees, as they said, were often reluctant to request accommodations.  They found significant anxiety about requesting job accommodations, it was much more challenging than asking for academic accommodations.  The presenters identified helpful coworkers or supervisors, health management behaviors and workplace accommodations, where there is a clear need to deepen the understanding of the ADA with the target population and they are suggesting it be paired with 504 accommodations or even IDEA services in an educational setting to address gaps in knowledge.  And also recommended increased emphasis on self advocacy training with specific focus on workplace accommodation benefits and managing those requests.  Noting the previous research has shown those with poor self advocacy skills are less likely to request workplace accommodation.  Recognizing that youth from ethnic and racial minorities were highly represented in the sample, presenters noted the need to ensure cultural competence of both messages and the messengers in order to achieve the desired outcome.  We know from previous research that the unemployment rate of people of color in the target population exceed those of their white peers.  And finally, the environmental context of these findings is important.  Presenters note the recent 2021 BLS data showing the 30% difference in labor force participation versus 20 to 24 and 40% versus 70% between youth with disabilities and their nondisabled peers has only exacerbated this difference.  If the recession of 2007 is any guide we know the return to labor force for people with disabilities will lag behind those without disabilities.
But the goal is not just increased understanding, but acting on their rights under the ADA invention testing and evaluation is a good next step recognizing this could differ according to disability type.  Another area of potential research could focus on the positive ADA accommodation requests made to employers by transition‑age youth understanding what worked from the employer perspective and the characteristics of those requests and accommodations could be useful.  Dr. Rumrill introduced us to the National Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Americans with Disabilities Act Research Project which began in 2003 started at the Virginia Commonwealth University and housed at the University of Kentucky.  Human health and life outcome disparities between employed and unemployed people call the employment of people with disabilities a national public health concern.  Noting workplace discrimination against people with disabilities is a common threat to labor participation and a threat to public health.  To eliminate it then we must study it and understand its etiologies symptoms, threat, effective and inhibiting factors and overall impact.  To date nearly a hundred studies come from the database, just over a hundred authors and 25 universities.  The database has information on over a million unique, closed allegations, identified in any of 41 different prohibitive actions characterized as either job acquisition, working conditions or job retention violations.  It also allows researchers to study the characteristics of employers, differences in discrimination experiences between and within impairment groups, resolutions and discrimination patterns over time.  There has been a slow, steady increase in filings since 2009.  The five areas make up 84% of the filings but by firing 34% followed by reasonable accommodations at 19%, and employers win three out of four cases.
People with hearing loss and vision loss have higher merit rates at 30% each, and people with substance abuse disorders have lowest merit rates at 18%.  Given the subject of the previous presentation by Fabian and Deschamps it would be interested to break down the reasonable accommodations request by age seen with the transition‑age youth experience accommodation requests have been.  Understanding the effects of COVID as new closed cases find their way into the database will be important as we begin to emerge from the pandemic, learn how it has affected the nature of the complaints and as well as the characteristics of the filings.  Sarah von Schrader cite research identifying with multiple factors that influence the employer to hire and accommodate qualified workers with disabilities.  But each focused on small businesses, meaning they understand Title I limitations, they pose three research questions in their mixed method approaches.  One of the barriers to effective communication with small employers, how do small businesses learn and incorporate information, how does ADA work, and how can they use the steady filings to inform the development of their toolkit.  The first phase was to target audience research, including secondary data analysis interviews and a survey to inform the development tools of small business that will be tested and refined through workplace pilots in the region.  With the goal being widespread distribution of small businesses to support the hiring of people with disabilities.  How do small businesses learn about and incorporate information about the ADA into their work?  Google was the most common method.  And A variety of other homegrown resources network support.  They then use their findings to build tools for small business, starting with the development of this toolkit that was mentioned.  Based on the feedback of employers in the study, the toolkit includes real examples and practical information written in plain language.  The toolkit delivers information in short interactive ways formatted around specific topics, including COVID‑19, that reflect the employers' identified needs.  Businesses are set in preliminary and pilot testing, but the user friendly tool provides quick responses to the questions and that it is accessible, comprehensive and engaging, all go‑to resources to help them move forward.  The collection of pilot data will help inform the next steps and adapt the toolkit accordingly.  The studies could explore whether there is any association between small businesses using the toolkit and employee satisfaction and retention or exploring that the toolkit utilization had a positive effect on the future hiring practices of individuals with disabilities.  Adya and Whaley noted that meaningful social participation but noted strongly you to have your basic needs met which includes a certain level of financial stability.  A great deal of research was focused on banks and gap remains to address how individuals with disabilities use, save and grow funds through established ways to establish security.  While we have a legacy of government programs and supports designed to maintain a basic standard of living for people with disabilities, there are few policies intensives or initiatives that foster asset accumulation or growth.
There have been notable improvements, as the presenters note, particularly the achieving a better life experience or ABLE Act which aims to ease financial strain faced by people with disabilities by making tax‑free savings accounts available to provide for qualified disability expenses.  Money management is a basic and necessary skill.  It requires interaction with the banking industry.  The presenters examined the accessibility practices of financial institutions and the financial inclusion experiences of community members asking how people with disabilities are able to access and benefit from financial services through banks, credit unions and other financial service providers.  How is the financial service community engaged with the disability community and what barriers do people with disabilities experience.  And how is this impacted by geographic availability.  The answer to the first question, they developed a tool that includes 48 quality indicators developed across 8 different domains driven by a participatory action research approach including multiple stakeholders.  They then examine the websites of 82 banks in 8 states.  Finding comprehensive information on websites was challenging.  Particularly for smaller banks that had less robust websites in general and they did find a few key variations between urban and rural institutions.  More relevant accessible customer support and communication information was available from rural financial institutions as compared to urban ones and for banks compared to credit unions.  More relevant financial education counseling information was available at urban financial institutions as compared to rural ones.  But they found it was difficult to find information about policies and practices for employees or community engagement activities, and information about available services was easier to find but local and regional banks often had limited information in comparison to larger national.  Local and regional banks had little information for people with disabilities who may have particular needs related to access or specialized needs which created a negative experience for people with disabilities.
As they said, complicating the research, the financial institutions did not allow site visits or follow‑up discussions with staff to find this information.  So there are clear information gaps that were discovered that could create unnecessary barriers to access for people with disability.  Even if this was a participatory action research approach with engaged financial professionals, I hope the dialogue with them can continue.  But the goal of increasing their understanding of the information needs help people with disabilities and how they may better meet them.  It was good to hear in the presentation that the theme is developing an accessibility and inclusion self assessment course for financial institutions.
Hopefully this will improve the availability of information for people with disabilities.
What have we discovered today?  We have validated the ongoing persistent challenge of implicit bias and learned that high levels of employment stigma related to negative attitudes for disability, decrease support in recruitment efforts and intention of hiring people with disabilities among those in a position to make hiring decisions.  Stigma was also seen as a primary barrier by transition‑age youth and the focus group analyses by Fabian and Deschamps, specifically employers have a negative attitude about them.  Other barriers for this population included the individuals with disability or health condition itself creating performance issues but interviewees having a reluctance to request accommodation.  Significant anxiety from youth when requesting job accommodations, they found much more challenging than asking about academic accommodations.  On the positive side the centers identified helpful coworkers, supervisors, management behaviors and workplace accommodations as supports or facilitators of employment for youth leading them to call for increased exposure to the rights of youth under the ADA and integrating this with 504 and IDEA information in an educational setting.  The NEARP database tells us that case counts are federally increasing.  Employers win three or four cases.  While five areas make up an overwhelming majority of cases, the top two, firings and reasonable accommodations make up more than just over half.  We learn there is little research targeting the Title I needs of small businesses but targeted bursts of information in areas of need identified by the businesses, using practical examples, in plain language, can lead to the update of tools and hopefully, by extension, the positive employment outcomes for people with disabilities.  Finally, we learned there are some important differences between urban and rural financial institutions, and generally there are real challenges facing people with disabilities when looking for specific information relating to their needs on many banking websites.  Information is power.  It allow us to make informed decisions within our spheres of influence.  Someone with a disability, navigating a credit union website or a transition‑age youth unsure how to ask for job accommodations or a small business with resources to implement those accommodations.  That's really what we have been talking about in the conference, how to deliver the right information to the right people positive reinforcement and employment outcomes for people with disabilities.  And hovering over all of these important findings is our current environmental content.  Faced with both COVID and conversations about racial equity in both the courtroom and our politics.  But where do we go from here.  In her keynote address Maria Town grounded us in our current environmental and political context.  The advance of COVID on the employment of people with disabilities, as some of our presenters also noted, have been profound.  The unemployment rate has doubled.  A disproportionate number of people with disabilities are working in jobs with no telework option.  And they face barriers to adequate and affordable broadband services if they do have that option.  We have an opportunity, I would say a responsibility, to continue to explore the effects of COVID on disability employment outcomes and ensure that the findings from a knowledge translation standpoint are getting into the hands of those who can influence positive policy outcomes.  That's not an argument or a call for partisanship.  It's a recognition that there are many people working hard today to ensure that we do not return to business as usual and the way things were prior to COVID.  But instead use the knowledge that we have gained from research like we heard here today to help envision the employment system that we want to have tomorrow.  How can we preserve the flexibility that telework has offered those able to take advantage of.  And as offices and workplaces reopen, how can we assure that evolving employer practices, rather policies and procedures, are designed for people with disabilities in mind.  How do we do a better job identifying those who gained as well as those who lost work as a result of COVID.  What are the characteristics and what factors influence those outcomes.  These are just a few questions where more disability‑specific data is needed.  The gaps that could be filled by future ADA National Network Research Projects.  Maria also talked about the President's infrastructure proposal, and specifically the $400 billion to be spent over 10 years that would support home and community‑based services.  This would be a significant systems‑level shift in how we are approaching support services for people with disabilities.  Not unlike the New Freedom Initiative that president George W. Bush proposed in conference funded in 2001 to accelerate implementation of the Supreme Court's Olmstead decision for those of you who were around then.  The Freedom Initiative targeted employment disincentives and provided infrastructure grants for states to build Medicaid buy‑in programs for example.  But the real goal was system of change.  Move us away from the institutional services and settings and employee community‑based options fostering meaningful social participation, which includes competitive employment.  The dialogue happening now around the current infrastructure proposal is similar.  No, these dollars won't create an entitlement to home and community‑based services but they would accelerate federal policy shift away from funding institutional settings while also supporting significant wage increases to direct care workers, addressing the supply side shortages that are now plaguing many states.  And in some cases, keeping people with disabilities out of the workforce.  Equity is also an important part of our current environmental context, it has been named as a priority by the White House.  The issue was addressed by a few of our presenters today.  The series of Executive Orders are issued on the subject, federal agencies are taking this very seriously.  Increasingly they are including language in research funding opportunities to ensure that historically underrepresented and under studied subpopulations are being included in the research projects.  This includes the Administration for Community Living.  I know the ADA National Network centers are in the fifth year of your funding cycle, which means the competition is again being held to retain or begin anew as one of the 10 regional centers.  I wish you all luck.  As part of this year's applications I was excited not only to see that the research component would continue but that applicants were also, as Wendy noted during the Q and A session, required to provide the racial and ethnic characteristics of a particular regional population.  And based on these racial and ethnic characteristics, the centers will need to maximize ADA knowledge and impact among the full diversity of stakeholders in the region.  We know that not all subpopulations of people with disabilities experience similar outcomes.  The more we know about the reasons for these disparate outcomes the better equipped we will be to define, test, and evaluate potential solutions to improve them.
So, again, I want to thank Kurt and the center at the University of Washington for the opportunity.  I want to thank our presenters for the important work that you are doing.  And I look forward to your continued progress over the next two days of the conference.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Thank you John, that was a great summary and I really appreciate it.  Tomorrow we hope to see many of again as we continue day 2 of the ADA State of the Science Virtual Conference.  Once again we will have a keynote speaker, a closing speaker, five research presentations, all related to community development and planning.  And so we look forward to seeing you there.  When you leave your zoom window a new browser window will open with a survey asking for feedback about today's session.  We'd really appreciate if you take the time to fill out that survey so that we can have the data on your evaluation.  And with that, thank you for attending and we look forward to seeing you tomorrow!
(End of Day 1).