Employers worry accommodations will be expensive. The reality: most workplace accommodations for blind employees cost little or nothing. A screen reader license, some flexible document formats, a willingness to describe the whiteboard. The expensive thing is the talent you lose by assuming otherwise. #NDEAM
@payown um if they are not NVDA friendly, and many employers are not, and you have to use their hardware configured the way they want, locked down, then it is not cheap to employ a blind person. Unless I'm missing something.
Oct 9, 2026, 8:42 PM
@serrebi That's a fair point, and I agree there can be costs involved, especially when employers have systems that don't work with NVDA. But I think there's more to consider here. I wonder if blind employees tend to stay with their employers longer? I don't have any data to back that up, but if that's the case, wouldn't the cost of accommodations be less than what an employer might spend hiring and training multiple people over the same period of time? Just something I think we should consider when talking about the cost of hiring someone who is blind.
@payown I agree with you that over the long term, blind people cost about the same, but you and I both know companies don't look at us like that, with our up front costs to them, because they want things done a certain way and won't budge.
@payown @serrebi the problem is not the price of the software, it is the humans controling the price of the software. If the software developer will not accomadate disabled employees the employer should be made to find one who is mature enough to see us as equals or pay for the ignorance in not doing so. Marketing people set up the algorithms that tell us what we should pay attention to because they are supposed to know about how to influence people. Since they do not market to the disabled and 1 in 30 Canadians at least has a vision problem the marketers are making the choice to exclude us from perceived normal society, thus users worth developing for
@payown Very true.