OK, test case for you guys...

A company has a vacant position for a role that involves debugging and development. A lot of the debugging comes from the live code and it requires the person in the role to contact the users of the software to try and analyse what is wrong so that they can fix it.

Now, someone with cerebral palsy applies for the position. The person is capable of doing the work, has done a bit of development before etc... but is not able to speak clearly (due to the cerebral palsy).

If you were the employer and were interviewing for the position what would you do? If you didn't hire the person would that be discriminating against his disability?

If the applicant can prove they were rejected solely on that basis, then yes.

My guess is it that ain't easy. I bet there are plenty of jobs I applied for and got interviews that went well, but for which I didn't get the position because someone looked at my age at the time and went "female+20-something=babies+time off work". Of course, I can't prove that was the case, but it felt like it at the time.

An employer is required to make 'reasonable adjustments' in order to try and accomodate someone with a disability, but the key word is 'reasonable'. So if he were blind and needed either a brailler or a screen reader; that would be considered reasonable. With your chap with Cerebral Palsy, is there a reasonable adjustment that could be made that would allow him to do that part of the job. I'm not aware of anything but then it's not something I know a lot about.

Does he need to speak with customers, or just be in contact with them? If speech is a requirement then if Stephen Hawking can do it by batting an eyelid then there is no reason why this person can not speak using similar means.

When I said "contact the users" I mean phone them up and go through it with them whilst connected to their computer. (users are "in-house" users).

Just interested TBH. I'm nothing to do with the hiring/firing here so just wondering what would happen in this case.

He can't though. Stephen can speak but quite a lot of what he says is prepared by his carers earlier (in effect he 'writes down' what he wants to say and they transcribe that to a list of relevant phrases which he selects from using the limited movement that remains to him). He can only hold a conversation in very limited terms because if he has to select from the more 'general' set of phrases it takes him quite some time to select each chunk of speech. The software is 'smart' in a predictive text kind of way but the bare fact is having a conversation with Stephen is a very laborious affair. While his system allows him to give prepared talks and is better than nothing, it's not in the least equivalent to the speech someone without his condition is capable of. I doubt very much his tool is at all appropriate for being used in a user support environment.

Now, obviously, in the case of the initial applicant it depends entirely on the exact nature and level of function that the condition has allowed them. Some people with CP can converse fine but have problems with major limb movements for example, which I don't think would be much of an impediment at all. Ian Dury had a form of CP and he never had a problem expressing himself. And given CP is generally non-progressive, if they can do it on day one they'll be fine to carry on doing it after.

Jon

Exactly - so if he could communiacte via e-mail etc then they would need to hire him - if he needs to commincate on the phone and he cant do that then there is no need to offer the job

It's also worth poitning out that the candidate would also still have to be the best person of the job. If someone with greater qualifications/skill applied then employing the disable person would be discriminating against the other candidate. There are certain situations where positive discrimination is permitted but I struggle to see this being one of them. It would depend on the selection criteria used in the interview.

(Just FYI, I think Ian Drury had had polio as a child)

That's what they used to say, when he appeared on shows in the 80s, that he had had polio.

There was a blind man in the same computing class at me at college he was better at giving eye contact than me

Particularly with the ladies?

And at the nudist colony