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National Skills Summit
Skills Summit Highlights
Statement from
Steve Guengerich,
Executive Vice President, AFL-CIO
One out of every five of us in this room today, will experience some form of disability within our lifetimes. While the government and private sectors have come together with remedies in the "physical world" through landmark legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the fact is that - when it comes to Information Technology and the Internet - relatively little has been done to make the "online world" accessible. Thus, the vast majority of web sites today - well over 99 percent - are inaccessible or, only partially accessible, to people with disabilities.
Now, contrast this situation with the state of the economy. We are at an historic low in unemployment rates in the general population. Companies, like those in my hometown of Austin, Texas, are in a frenzied competition for people with even basic computer networking, programming, and administration skills. Yet, there are very few people with disabilities employed, or being hired, at these companies.
Three years ago, we set about to reconcile this situation, by creating an event - called the Accessibility Internet Rally, or AIR - and a new national non-profit to produce and sustain the event's results, Knowbility, Inc. The first AIR - AIR-Austin - was held in 1998 and resulted in 20 newly accessible web sites being created by teams of non-profits and professional web designers - in a single day! With the help of our sponsors such as Powershift Group, IBM, Mitsubishi and others, we have since then held a second bigger AIR-Austin and this year are expanding the AIR events to two more cities - AIR-DFW (Dallas Ft. Worth) and Rocky Mountain AIR (Boulder-Denver).
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