EXCLUSIVE: Delanie Lever, who has sight impairment, spoke to The Mirror about the employment barriers she has faced ahead of the publication of Alan Milburn’s review into unemployed people
A 24-year-old woman with sight impairment said she has suffered “humiliating” experiences in workplaces despite firms having signed up to an employers’ disability scheme.
Delanie Lever, from the north west, described “disheartening” experiences at three separate businesses that failed to provide her with extra equipment for her condition between the ages of 19 and 23. Ms Lever, who has Retinitis Pigmentosa, which is degenerative, said her eyesight can fluctuate with the condition – and leaves her feeling though she has to force employers to believe her.
“One day I might be able to do a task, and the next I might not, and that’s not me lying or making it up or exaggerating,” she told the Mirror. “I think employers would see that and question the authenticity of what I’m saying and the truth behind it.
“It did put me off work for a while because I thought, well, how are people going to believe me? Because with me, it’s an invisible disability. So I don’t have a guide dog. I don’t have a cane. I don’t look disabled.”
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Ahead of Alan Milburn’s landmark review into unemployed young people, Ms Lever – who contributed to the report – is calling for better and more consistent support so employees with disabilities don’t feel like a “burden”. For her, accessibility issues started at school, including when an exam board failed to provide her with larger print exam papers during her GCSEs.
Teachers photocopied new booklets for her on the day but the diagrams and measurements were distorted during the process, she said. “I’d already failed before I even started that exam,” she said. “Now that is so hard to swallow because I know that I worked really hard. Had I been provided with the right papers and given that equal chance to my peers, I would have succeeded.”
At her first job, aged 19, Ms Lever said a staff trainer at a call centre told her she was not suited to the role because she could not input information fast enough, despite not being provided with a monitor to magnify her screen.
“That was just so disheartening – and humiliating because it was in front of other people – to be told I can’t do something because of something I have absolutely no control over. Given the right equipment, I probably would have been able to be on target,” she said.
She went on to encounter similar troubles in not being provided the right equipment at two more jobs, at an insurance company and an HR firm. Ms Lever added: “As somebody with a disability, I would never apply to a company that hasn’t got the disability confident employer badge and all of them have had it. Now all three of them I’ve been discriminated against.”
The Disability Confident scheme supports employers to hire and keep disabled people in work. The 24-year-old, who now works as a customer support and complaints officer at the Royal National Institute of Blind People, is calling on employers to focus on what disabled people can do, not what they can’t do.
“I want them to be seen for the person, not the sight impairment,” Ms Lever said. “At interviews, the question has always been sort of what can’t you do rather than what can you do. That’s the first question. It feels like: How much of a burden are you going to be on this company? How expensive is it going to be to accommodate you?”