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Re: Elevator speeches about accessibility

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From: deborah.kaplan
Date: Jun 11, 2012 10:07AM

On Mon, 11 Jun 2012, Scott González wrote:
> Do you have links to credible resources that show these statistics?

Yep, the U.S.Census. http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/disability/disability.html

To summarize the confusing plethora of links below, the numbers you get a percentage of the population with a disability (1) are always limited to the noninstitutionalized population and (2) depend on which of the three major government instruments you are looking at between 2000-2010, and the numbers range from 9.9% to 19.3%, roughly 10-20%, depending on data collection instrument you decide to trust. The poverty statistics, however, are consistent: 20% of the population below poverty level, 65% of the population is unemployed (versus 28% unemployed for the non-disabled population).

Obviously the employment numbers are not going to reflect the last couple of terrible years, but historically at risk populations are the first to suffer in downturns, so it wouldn't be surprised if they only got worse.

Anyway, specific links:

So it's 12% of the non-institutionalized population identified as having a disability: http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_10_3YR_S1810&;prodType=table

20% of the non-institutionalized population below the poverty level, vs. 11% for the non-dsabled population: http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_10_3YR_S1811&;prodType=table

(And that same table shows that another 14% of the noninstitutionalized population of people with disabilities lives within 150% of the poverty level, compared to 7% of the noninstitutionalized population of people without disabilities.)

The 20% number comes from the 2000 census: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/disability/disabstat2k.html -- technically it's 19.3%. I actually can't find numbers that high in the more recent ACS, so I'm wondering if they changed their counting methodology or if it's reporting a different number. Both show the noninstitutionalized population (of course the numbers will be much higher for the institutionalized population, I assume). Ah, yes: <http://disabilitystatistics.org/faq.cfm#Q1dash>; The 2009 American Community Survey, which asked different questions and therefore identifies and overlapping but different population, finds 9.9 percent of the civilian noninstitutionalized population age 16 to 64 had a disability. http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/american_community_survey_acs/cb10-cn78.html

The link above also references that about 34.7 percent of people with disabilities were employed compared with 71.9 percent of people without a disability.

Disabilitystatistics.org, a Cornell website which crunches US statistics numbers, shows that around 8% of the population reports work limitations. Sorry, they don't appear to have direct links to the generated charts, but the site is easy use and is at http://disabilitystatistics.org/


-Deborah