An Examination of Systems-Level Barriers to Employment for Persons with Vision Loss
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Purpose The objective of this paper is to report results from a Canadian-based study addressing systems-level barriers that restrict the employment of persons with vision loss, specifically in the experience of searching for and maintaining competitive employment. This paper aims to generate knowledge which may inform strategies and advocacy efforts to enhance opportunities for, and experiences of, paid employment for persons with vision loss. Design/methodology/approach This constructivist, grounded theory study used in-depth, semi-structured interviews with seven participants with restricted vision (those who are legally blind) to frame data collection and analyses. Findings Three interconnected themes emerged: facing and negotiating barriers, the cyclical process of seeking and keeping employment and settling for second best. Participants described barriers to employment that have been described in previous literature that not only continue to exist, but that act to potentiate one another, resulting in settling for competitive employment experiences that are second best. This represents a type of social injustice that has been previously described as ‘occupational injustice’. We explain this concept and link it to participants’ experiences. Research limitations This was a small, geographically bounded study. Nonetheless, the findings resonate with previous research and further our understanding regarding how barriers are experienced. Social implications Knowledge gained furthers the understanding of how systemic obstacles restrict and bound the participation of persons with vision loss in the labour market. Originality/value While the barriers to employment for persons with low vision have been previously well described, this paper demonstrates how these barriers interact and act synergistically with one another, thereby reinforcing the need to focus on shortcomings at the service, system and policy level, in addition to individual rehabilitation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".