Ms Jodie McGriele:

People genuinely worry about such things. It is that piece of education for employers on disability and inclusion, and the enrichment they could get from employing people with disabilities. We saw a massive increase in engagement around that in businesses around the Covid-19 pandemic. That time gave businesses an opportunity to take a step back and improve in that area. We definitely have seen more engagement around that.

From the perspective of people who are blind or vision impaired, there are huge barriers from the get go. Websites are inaccessible so people cannot log on to publicjobs.ie to find out what jobs are being advertised. Some of the assessments used as part of the public service recruitment process are inaccessible. The assessments might be accessible using technology such as non-visual desktop access, NVDA, or job access with speech, JAWS, as ascreen-reader but if a person is using an iPad or voiceover then the assessments are not accessible. Also, personal readers are not offered so it is a situation of "ask your family member" but my mum is also blind, and people are told this is the deadline and work with it. Mr. Doran can talk more about the recruitment and the index.