Employment outcomes and experiences of people with seeing disability in Canada: An analysis of the Canadian Survey on Disability 2017
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Many individuals with disabilities face barriers to meaningful employment. Legislation has been put in place to ensure employment equity for individuals with disabilities in Canada. However, little is known about the employment profile and experiences of people with seeing disabilities. OBJECTIVES: The objectives of our research study were to explore the employment rates of people with seeing disabilities in Canada, the factors associated with being employed, and supports and barriers that affect their work participation. METHODS: We used the nationally representative data from the Canadian Survey on Disability (CSD) 2017, collected by Statistics Canada. The CSD is a national cross-sectional survey of Canadians 15 years of age and above who face a functional limitation due to a health-related condition, representing more than 6 million (n = 6,246,640) Canadians. Our analyses focused on people who reported having a seeing disability. A subset of the complete dataset was created, focusing on individuals with a seeing disability. Weighted descriptive analyses were performed using SPSS. Multivariate logistic regression analyses were conducted for individuals between 25-64 years of age to identify predictors of employment. RESULTS: Out of the estimated 892,220 working-age adults (25-64 years) with a seeing disability who were represented by the survey, 54% were employed, 6% were unemployed and 40% were not in the labour force. Early onset of seeing disability (OR: 1.33; 95% CI: 1.32-1.35), less severe seeing disability (OR: 1.51; 95% CI: 1.49-1.53), education above high school (OR: 2.00; 95% CI: 1.97-2.02) and daily use of the internet (OR: 2.46; 95% CI: 2.41-2.51) were positively related with employment. The top three employment accommodations that were needed and were made available included: modified work hours (45%); work from home (38.5%) and a modified workstation (37%). The top three needed but least available accommodations were technical aids (14%), communication aids (22%) and a computer with specialized software or adaptation (27%). Overall, 26% reported that an accommodation was required but was not made available by the employer. While 75% of individuals with a seeing disability were out of the labour force due to their condition, the remaining identified barriers that prevented them from working which included (top 3): (i) too few jobs available (20%); (ii) inadequate training/experience (19%), (iii) past attempts at finding employment were unsuccessful (19%). CONCLUSION: Adults with seeing disability in Canada experience lower labour force participation than the general population. Rigorous programs are required to assist them with the job search, job retraining and workplace accommodations. It is important for governments to improve efforts towards inclusive education and develop strategies that promote digital literacy of employees and job seekers with visual impairments. Although accessibility legislations have been put in place, programs should be established that provide accessibility solutions for various employers, enabling them to hire individuals with different abilities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".