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Although National Disability Employment Awareness Month is over, I intend to continue employment-related articles on my blog in the future. On October 29, 2020, I gave an employment presentation over Zoom. It prompted some great questions and discussion with the audience. My presentation had four topics. In this article, I will summarize the content of my presentation in the hope my synopsis might be beneficial to other people.
The first subject I discussed was tax Incentives to hire people with disabilities. I began by discussing the
Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC).
The credit encourages employers to hire people in particular groups. These groups include vocational rehabilitation clients, Supplemental Security Income recipients and veterans. For an employer to claim the credit, new employees must voluntarily choose to participate in data collection. Once willingness to participate is established, an employer must request and receive from a state workforce agency certification that the person is a member of at least one target group. The amount of WOTC which an employer can claim depends on which target group an employee is in, number of hours the employee has worked during first year and amount of the employee’s wages. I learned about two additional tax credits in an
article about tax incentives from the Job Accommodation Network (JAN).
A second tax credit is the Disabled Access Credit. It can help provide accommodation for people with hearing difficulties, removing physical access barriers, disability accommodation through equipment modification and accommodating individuals who have visual impairments. Finally, the Architectural and Transportation Barrier Removal Deduction allows A business to deduct up to $15000 to make a public transportation vehicle or facility more useable and accessible to people with disabilities. The deduction cannot be used for a complete renovation or new building construction. My second presentation topic was disability disclosure.
Disclosing a disability or not is an individual’s choice according to this
JAN article about disability disclosure.
If disability disclosure occurs, an individual only needs to do so if a workplace accommodation is needed. Disability-related information should only be shared with people who need to know.
Requesting a change at work can suffice, without an employee using the term reasonable accommodation. For more information, I suggest reading one or both of my previous articles about this subject. Here is
my first article discussing disability disclosure
and
The final two topics of my recent presentation are related to one another.
For my third topic, I provided an explanation of reasonable accommodations. According to this
job accommodations article from the U.S. Department of Labor,
a job accommodation is an adjustment to the work environment so that a person with disability can perform a job. Not all people with disabilities need accommodations. An accommodation does not always accommodate two people with the same disability. Three areas in which accommodations may be requested are the application process, modifications to the work environment enabling performance of essential job functions and changes which allow an employee with a disability to access employee benefits. My final topic was accommodation examples. I began by sharing examples of accommodations for people who have physical disabilities. I also discussed accommodations which may help people who have invisible disabilities. I ended the topic by sharing accommodation examples from my own experience as an employed individual who is blind. I was gratified to know that my entire presentation was well-received by the audience.
Question for readers: What did you learn from my presentation summary? I will return next week with another article.
Blake's talk 