Employers’ attitudes toward hiring individuals with visual impairments

Abstract Purpose: This study examines: (a) the attitudes of 196 private sector employers toward hiring individuals with visual impairments and (b) the impact of the employers’ individual characteristics (age, gender, and educational level), attitudes toward visual impairment, social contact with them, and the form of business entity on their attitudes toward hiring such individuals. Materials and methods: The research tool used is a questionnaire of 15 closed-type questions. Results: The results of this research verify that the examined variables are significant individual predictors of the employers’ attitudes that are expressed in 7 out of 15 questions. Conclusions: The majority of the participants provided negative or neutral answers for most of the questions and exhibited the same attitudes with regard to the employment of individuals with visual impairments. Only two variables from the examined ones – “frequency of social contact” and “attitudes toward visual impairment” – appear to affect the employers’ intentions to hire people with visual impairments. Implications for rehabilitation The target should be more favorable employer attitudes toward individuals with visual impairments. The target should be more informative employers in regard to individuals with visual impairments and their skills and capabilities Vocational rehabilitation professionals should be aware that employers’ individual factors, age, gender and educational level are factors shown to affect their attitudes toward the vocational integration of people with disabilities. Informative seminars can be based on the variables and the factors shown to affect employers’ attitudes.