Harnessing lived experience to promote accessible employment journeys
Emma Lovegrove, Denise Bertilone, Justin Brown, Elle Beaumont-Bilsby · 2025 · Proceedings of the 22nd International Web for All Conference (W4A) · doi:10.1145/3744257.3744264
Summary
This short paper describes the Inclusive Employability initiative at Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Perth, Australia, developed in 2024 to support students from equity cohorts — including people with disability, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, international students, and LGBTIQA+ community members — in their transition to graduate employment. The initiative was motivated by research showing that increased access to higher education does not directly translate to improved employment outcomes, with Australian data showing employment outcome differences of 8.9% or more for students with "reported disability." The team, which included Inclusive Employability Officers with lived experience of disability (including a screen reader user and a wheelchair user), designed a digital resource called "Strength in Diversity: enhancing your employment journey" housed in ECU's Canvas learning management system. The resource covers eight topics identified through co-design: workplace rights, finding inclusive employers, workplace culture, balancing cultural responsibilities, disability pride, workplace accommodations and self-advocacy, coping with setbacks and discrimination, and bringing your authentic self to the workplace. The co-design process involved eight one-on-one discussions with students and graduates about preferred formats, digital platforms, and employment experiences. Each topic features contextualized video interviews with students and graduates sharing their diverse employment journeys, with content choices driven by participants themselves.
Key findings
The design team's inclusion of people with lived experience of disability proved critical for identifying accessibility barriers that would otherwise have been missed. A screen reader user on the resource design team uncovered inaccessible elements in the Canvas LMS content, including broken internal hyperlinks and accordion content that screen readers could not identify or skipped entirely. The team also discovered that immersive reader tools, often assumed to be a digital accessibility solution for blind/low vision users, only read embedded content and lack the advanced navigation features screen reader users depend on — a distinction that non-screen-reader users typically do not recognize. The resource design captured a cross section of accessibility elements including alternative format Word documents for diagrams, captions and transcripts for videos (included by default, not upon request), and identification of problematic hyperlinks and headers. A review of 20 Australian university websites found only two that referred to embedded inclusive careers education, inclusive employability, or inclusive work-integrated learning initiatives, and no evidence of similar career development learning initiatives driven by lived experience. The concept of Disability Pride — acknowledging and embracing disability as part of identity — emerged as a vital element that improves self-confidence and enables students to share access needs when navigating recruitment processes.
Relevance
This paper addresses the critical gap between accessible higher education and accessible graduate employment, demonstrating that universities have a responsibility to support the employment transition for students with disabilities, not just their academic access. The co-design approach — with content designers who have lived experience of disability leading rather than merely consulting — offers a model for authentic inclusive resource development. For accessibility practitioners, the key insight is that people with lived experience should not only be enlisted as testers of finished products but should lead the design and development process from the outset. The paper's finding about immersive readers versus screen readers highlights how accessibility assumptions made by non-disabled designers can miss critical usability gaps. The emphasis on Disability Pride and self-advocacy as employment skills, alongside practical topics like finding inclusive employers and navigating accommodations, reflects a holistic approach to employability that goes beyond technical accessibility to address the social and psychological dimensions of disability in the workplace.
Tags: disability employment · lived experience · co-design · higher education · inclusive employability · career development · accessibility education
Standards referenced: WCAG