An information society and a knowledge based economy

Greetings!  I’m Scott Savoy, editor of writing services at www.sterlingcreations.ca and today I am delighted to bring you the weekly editorial of our president Donna J. Jodhan.
Today, Donna has something to say about the challenges being faced by disabled persons in an information society and a knowledge based economy.  I invite you to read on.
Enjoy your weekend.
 
 
An information society and a knowledge based economy
By Donna J. Jodhan
 
Yes!  This is what is facing all of us today.  Every man, woman, and child; we are living in an information society and a knowledge based economy.  No shocker and no shaker.  What exactly am I referring to?  We are living in a society that is depending more and more on information in order to make ourselves more marketable to our economy.  In short, we are depending more and more on the Internet to help us become more knowledgeable.
 
So what does all of this mean for a disabled person?  How does this affect our lives as persons with disabilities?  As I see it, it means that we as persons with disabilities have to work much harder to keep up.  We need to become more vocal when it comes to what we need in order to live as normal a life as possible.  We need to lobby harder and become better agents and conduits of change.  How can we do this?  By creating more awareness for ourselves; we need to make society aware of who we are, what we need, and why and we need to do it in a constructive and sustained way.  We need to put more pressure on governments to make their websites accessible to all.  We need to work with companies to ensure that their websites can easily be accessed by everyone including us.  We need to go out there and educate others on why websites need to be made accessible to all.  We need to tell everyone that it is not a nice to have when it comes to accessible websites.  Rather, it is our right to have.
 
So often, governments tend to ignore our needs when it comes to making their websites accessible.  For some odd reason they fail to consider us as persons who need to gain access to information just like the mainstream person.  So we need to pressure them to fix this problem.  Many companies often ignore our needs and in like manner we need to do the same.  The need for information is only going to increase with time and the need for knowledge in order to function in our economy is only going to become more acute as well.  These two situations are probably not going to go away so we might as well get used to it.
 
We already face very heavy challenges in our lives as disabled persons and an information society and a knowledge based economy are two things that are poised to make our lives even more difficult.  A part of the solution is for us to recognize this and once we accept the inevitable, then we can start to work from there.