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On one of my regular meanders through the farthest reaches of the information superhighway in search of disability-related websites, I came across .

Here, according to the page, is what Connect-Ability is/does.

“Connect-Ability began in late 2005 with a federal grant to the State of Connecticut to identify and remove barriers to employment faced by people with disabilities. This five-year, multimillion dollar systems change grant involved a detailed look at the State's employment and disability services infrastructure in order to identify problem areas and implement lasting solutions.

Connect-Ability has two primary customers:
* Employers of all sizes and in all industries who are seeking qualified workers
* People with disabilities of all ages who are seeking employment for the first time or who want a new challenge.

Our program does not directly provide services to match individuals with specific jobs. Instead, our efforts are targeted at removing the barriers which keep our primary customers from finding one another. These barriers include, but are not limited to, low expectations, the transition from school to work, inadequate transportation, and the actual process of recruitment, hiring, and retention.”

I fully expected the site to be patronising and mushy. But it's not. Granted, it’s possibly a little saccharine for British tastes but, then, it’s not been designed for a British audience.

The four (soon to be six) videos of the featured working disabled people are cleverly scripted so as to be up-front about the fact that they have impairments, and what those impairments are, whilst simultaneously leaving absolutely no doubt that they are all very effective in their chosen careers.

“A person who protects the country’s data (who can’t hear)” is very different from “a person tragically-afflicted by hearing-loss to whom some remarkably philanthropic business has been charitable enough to give employment”.

And, whilst this concept may not be rocket-science to you and me, there are some people – on both sides of the equation – on whom it’s going to have an unanticipated and very powerful impact. These are just people doing jobs: their impairments are largely irrelevant to their professional success. You’d have to be very firmly wedded to the tragedy model of disability indeed to respond to any of those videos by saying, “Oh, bless them! Aren’t they brave?”

But it’s not all about the videos by any means. There’s a lot of information on the site. Information about the process of getting a job; about how you might travel to and from your place of work; information for employers about a) why they would want to employ disabled people and b) the best way to attract applications from them; and pages for young disabled people who are just leaving school or college, with corresponding advice for their parents. This stuff has been very professionally and thoughtfully put together, and is well worth a read, regardless of where you’re based. (Although do bear in mind that the detailed information about employment law is based on the ADA rather than the DDA: there isn’t a direct read-across from one set of legal provisions to the other.)

I’ve been working in the disability and employment field a long time. It takes a lot to impress me. I’m seriously impressed by Connect-Ability.

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