Getting People with Disabilities Back to Work

Companies and advocacy groups are stepping up efforts to provide jobs for the rising number of unemployed people with disabilities.

Even as the disabled workforce shrank by 423,000 to about 4.9 million in the two years through May, the unemployment rate for people with disabilities increased to 15.6 percent from 13.7 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which began tracking the data in June 2008. The unemployment rate for people with no disabilities dropped to 8.5 percent from 8.9 percent in that same period. When it comes to taking on people with issues such as vision or hearing loss, one challenge is that hiring managers may not understand what tools they'll need to work productively.