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About ADC

First launched in 2020, the Accessibility Design Competition has now become an annual event, providing a collaborative platform for students to team up with industry partners and generate innovative ideas that promote inclusivity for individuals with disabilities in the workplace.

In 2024, the Accessibility Design Competition is expanding its scope to a national level, extending a warm welcome to students from all universities across Vietnam. Participants will have the opportunity to join in a range of workshops and mentoring sessions. These crafted sessions are designed to foster skill development and provide valuable guidance to the participants. Whether it's honing their ideation, refining their problem-solving techniques, or gaining insights from industry experts, the workshops and mentoring sessions offer a rich learning experience that will empower participants to excel in their future journey.

This year, the primary objective of ADC is to enhance awareness among students and businesses regarding the employment challenges faced by individuals with disabilities in Vietnam. Additionally, the competition aims to propose groundbreaking solutions that will expand employment opportunities for people with disabilities, enabling them in all shapes and forms - including physical, sensory, and cognitive disabilities - to access, perform and excel in working environments.

The proposed designs/prototypes must address one of the barriers to work and employment, such as lack of access to information, misconception, discrimination, training, etc. The final solutions can be presented in the form of a hardware prototype, a design for communication, or an idea ready to be implemented.

Background

Across the world, people with disabilities play a role as important as everyone else. They could be entrepreneurs and self-employed workers, farmers and factory workers, doctors and teachers, shop assistants and bus drivers, artists and computer technicians. Indeed, all jobs can be performed by a person with disabilities when the appropriate support is provided.

Unfortunately, it is not always that people with disabilities are recognized as equal to those with no disabilities.

For instance, people with disabilities are far less likely to be employed. In a study conducted among people aged 18 to 64, while only 35.5% of people with disabilities were employed, 76.5% of people without disabilities were secured with a job, which is over double that of people with disabilities (*). These findings could be attributed to many factors, namely a lack of information about the labour market, accessible facilities, policy restrictions, and low awareness of co-workers.

Although people with disabilities can contribute greatly to organisational goals in various ways, they can still be greatly hindered in work and life due to not being empathized with or having the right kind of support. For people with disabilities, their needs are ignored so often that they are eventually ostracized by the mass.

One of the strongest pillars of ableism is the ideology that one’s worth can be measured by one’s productivity and by that only. Therefore, to create an inclusive environment for people with disabilities, we believe it is crucial for us to first learn to see them as whole individuals rather than their impairment only.

(*) Houtenville, A. and Boege, S. (2019). Annual Report on People with Disabilities in America: 2018. Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire, Institute on Disability. Available at https://disabilitycompendium.org/sites/default/files/user-uploads/Annual_Report_2018_Accessible_AdobeReaderFriendly.pdfpdf