9 ms·

Show HN: Handicareers.com – A simple job board for disabled people

303 points by therealcoffee 10y ago

deutronium 10y ago
This sounds like a cool idea, good luck! Am I right in thinking there's no jobs on there at the moment though, I couldn't seem to see any. Edit: Getting a DB error now, but could see the page before
- therealcoffee 10y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! You are correct, the board is empty as I have literally just launched it. :-) Getting DB errors also now, thinking it might be a traffic issue.
  - benhoyt 10y ago
    I don't know if this was an official launch, but if you do have an official launch I think it'd be better to seed it by reaching out to some folks first. Even two or three postings before a launch event would have made it seem more complete.
milankragujevic 10y ago
It's offline... And powered by WordPress... > Error establishing a database connection
- alkonaut 10y ago
  I think we may have disabled it.
  - therealcoffee 10y ago
    I am actually getting the same issue, intermittently. Is it just a traffic overload issue? Anything I can do to make this more robust? I was not getting this before sharing the site.
    - eli 10y ago
      Look into caching so that it does not need to hit the database for everything. Been years since I used WordPress but there was something like WP Super Cache that worked OK. Your web server (e.g. Nginix) can also be configured to cache pages, and there are entire servers dedicated to caching like Varnish. Be forewarned that caching and cache invalidation can be surprisingly tricky to get perfect. You also might just actually need a beefier server. But at the very least you should be able to serve the homepage, which doesn't change super often, to everyone. Congrats on having a site popular enough that you get to learn about a whole new world of tools and technologies!
      - therealcoffee 10y ago
        Thanks I will look into caching plugins, starting with Super Cache. Hope this can stabilise things a bit. If that does not work, will have to look into server options. Thank you for your help and encouragement! :-)
    - garysieling 10y ago
      If it's a wordpress site, I found the best thing for me was to set up Cloudflare in front of the site, because they can cache a lot of requests. The next best thing is making sure APC is set up on your server. I've also had success tuning settings in Apache to help with memory use, but that's a lot more time consuming.
gtirloni 10y ago
For your niche, you should run your website through a few of these checkers and make sure it passes with flying colors: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/
- therealcoffee 10y ago
  Thank you this is very helpful!
- djKianoosh 10y ago
  Also you might try this during development: http://khan.github.io/tota11y/ http://khan.github.io/tota11y/ we've started to use it on the main theme for CBP apps: https://github.com/US-CBP/cbp-theme https://github.com/US-CBP/cbp-theme and it helps catch a bunch of basic issues while developing.
ekarulf 10y ago
Cool! I would suggest changing the branding to "a simple job board for people with disabilities." For many people the disability is a part of who they are - it's not how they self identify. See some of the existing non-profits in this space like http://www.bestbuddies.org http://www.bestbuddies.org
- sixstringtheory 10y ago
  On the point of "disabled people" vs "people with disabilities" I have this conversation a lot with my wife, who is an Occupational Therapist and who first introduced me to the idea of people-first language. I think there's merit in the idea, but I'm not sure it's a settled issue. She's also fluent in American Sign Language and studied Deaf culture as an anthro undergrad, and they are one of several examples of groups who diametrically oppose people-first language: Deafness is a defining and inseparable part of who they are as a person. I would love to hear the opinions of other people on this board who live with Autism, blindness, para- or quadri-plegia, or other forms of disabilities on the matter, as I don't see myself as being able to have an authoritative opinion, as someone who does not live with disability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People-first_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People-first_language
  - paulryanrogers 10y ago
    "Deafness is a defining and inseparable part of who they are as a person" Tangent: How true is that for people who become deaf at different stages of life besides birth?
    - sixstringtheory 10y ago
      That's a great question, and unfortunately we've reached the point where I'm afraid I can't speak authoritatively. I did a quick search regarding cultural vs. physical deafness, here are some interesting things I found: https://nad.org/issues/american-sign-language/community-and-culture-faq https://nad.org/issues/american-sign-language/community-and-... http://www.signwriting.org/about/questions/quest024.html http://www.signwriting.org/about/questions/quest024.html The reverse is also an interesting question: how does the Deaf community view people who seek to gain hearing through e.g. cochlear implants, like for a child born deaf? Answer: it's extremely controversial. It's an very interesting subject for me because I love thinking about language and how it shapes cognition and culture–and sign language is such a different paradigm than spoken or written languages. That being said I still only have a beginner's level understanding of Deaf culture, at least w.r.t. how far a hearing person could ever get. Edit: formatting
jukkakoskinen 10y ago
Nice idea. Can you tell a little about what got you started?
mettamage 10y ago
Curious question: how do you deal with people who post stuff that isn't relevant?
escapologybb 10y ago
Man, I'm quadriplegic and I had to set up my business as it was basically the only way I could get a job. People with severe disabilities don't tend to make the most reliable employees timekeeping wise because you just can't guarantee that you will be at a place at a given time, I cannot in any way guarantee that I will be fit for work at 9 AM on Monday morning, it's just the nature of the disability. And that's the same for most people with severe disabilities. That just won't fly with most employers. I'd be really interested where you've found a stock of sympathetic employers willing to deal with these issues, because I've not found many. Also, why separate out disabled people from "normal" people, I'm genuinely curious? I mean I appreciate the effort of you trying to find us work, but don't you see how you are coming at it from the wrong angle. If you are going to separate out disabled people from the rest of the job market, how about a board where disabled people post their skills, the hours they can guarantee per week to work and the wage they are willing to work for just like other niche job markets? What separates out this job market from the others in the space? Also, by disabled do you mean blind and deaf or do you mean anybody with any type of disability? The type of disability will have a huge impact on the type of job. You don't have any jobs listed so I can't get a handle on who exactly this is meant for you see. I'm not trying to be a dick, I'm really not and I'm sure this effort comes from a good place but if you haven't got a group of employers willing to employ disabled people then you are really going to struggle. I wish you luck. I have lots of questions, I may also have answers, hit me up if you want to chat.
- extra88 10y ago
  > Also, why separate out disabled people from "normal" people, I'm genuinely curious? Since, as you recognize, many employers are unprepared to even think about how a particular disability is not a barrier to a particular job or about accommodations that would enable someone to perform the job, there could be value to people with disabilities for a site where employers identify themselves as having thought about it. Many, if not most, jobs appear in more than one place so this can be another one. Still, I'm more inclined to prefer a job board for everyone that has options like Craigslist's "ok to highlight this job opening for persons with disabilities" checkbox [0]. [0] https://www.craigslist.org/about/disabilities https://www.craigslist.org/about/disabilities
mwcampbell 10y ago
As a person with a disability myself (legally blind), I have a couple of concerns with this idea. First, the category of people with disabilities is quite broad. There are not only different categories of disability, but also a broad spectrum of severity for any given disability. Why would an employer post to a job board for people with disabilities in general, except out of a misguided sense of charity, or perhaps to meet some kind of quota? And that brings me to the bigger concern: Why do people with disabilities need a special job board just for us anyway? Surely that is a failure to fully integrate us into mainstream society, which I think is ultimately the best thing for everyone. By the way, though I hate the clunkiness of terminology like "people with disabilities", I think it's justified in this case. For me, the word "disabled", particularly in the context of employment, has the connotation of being unable to be productive. Some people's disabilities are severe enough that that's true of them, but that's not all of us, not by a long shot. Maybe I'm being over-sensitive about that, but I'm just telling you how I see it, for what it's worth.
- extra88 10y ago
  Do you use a screenreader? I was looking at the Find Jobs page, which appears to trigger the search on any "on blur" event in the form, and thinking that this is a good case for using ARIA live regions [0]. I was also thinking that it would be better if it took a progressive enhancement approach and had a working Submit button to POST the form when JavaScript is not running but that's another matter. [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/ARIA_Live_Regions https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...
- benhoyt 10y ago
  Interesting perspective on the terms (in your last paragraph). I've long thought it's odd how this language has changed over the years. A long time ago a disabled person might have been called "retarded" -- that's probably the most offensive term of all now, but the literal meaning of the word itself is least offensive, simply meaning "slowed down". Then came "handicapped", which isn't used much anymore, but literally just means having some kind of restriction. Now we are much more enlightened and say "disabled" -- it's the least offensive term now, but if you take it literally that word is quite horrible, meaning "not working" or "incapacitated" or "turned off" or "unable to be used", as in "the bomb squad disabled the bomb". Why did we settle on a word that means "not working" for someone who has a handicap?
DanBC 10y ago
One of the forms mentions London, thus some UK advice. "handicareers" seems like a play on the handicapped word. You might need to know that word is strongly rejected by large numbers of the UK population. This is possibly going to attract strongly negative attention. You might want to link employers and potential employees to advice about Access to Work, and to best current practice about reasonable adjustments, and to advice about the Equality Act.
- escapologybb 10y ago
  This exactly. This was my first clue that this person probably wasn't from the UK. You're totally right, the word handicapped is definitely the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the name and it wasn't a nice association. But if they are not aiming at the UK market then there probably isn't a reason to change it, but if operating inside the UK then I think the name might be a real problem. It just makes me think of "HandiCapable" which is a horrible term. To be clear, I don't think the OP is trying to be offensive but inside the UK I think you might this kind of feedback quite a lot.
kaa2102 10y ago
I really LOVE this concept. I think it is much needed. I've seen studies of entire customer service departments staffed by disabled individuals who showed extreme patience and empathy with customers resulting in higher satisfaction. One consideration to improve the user experience is to make sure that the website is Section 508 Compliant (www.section508.gov) so that it is easier to access for individuals with hearing and visual disabilities.
- extra88 10y ago
  Section 508 is specifically for U.S. government work and rather outdated. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are much more useful [0] and if you meet all the success criteria for WCAG level AA, you should also meet Section 508 requirements (there may be one or two overly prescriptive details in 508 that may require tweaking to get to 100%). [0] https://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.php https://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.php
Goldenromeo 10y ago
good job, but please try to fix ssh. I tried accessing the https version of your site but it didn't work. First chrome complained it was unsafe, and later your host returned a generic page for new sites.
- extra88 10y ago
  I think you mean SSL or TLS, not SSH.
pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
discriminating against the those lacking in disabilities is still discrimination. you're all idiots.
thefaketea 10y ago
I think that it's a very interesting idea!
homero 10y ago
Love it
orionblastar 10y ago
I am mentally ill and disabled because of it. When companies have a disabled plan it is for people in wheelchairs, the blibd, and the deaf but not the mentally ill. I have good days and bad days with my mental illness and sometimes lose track of what I am doing if interrupted too much. I know I have to take interruptions from my work for help desk assistance and other things like team members. My mental illness has some things in common with high functioning autism, and bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia and is so rare that half of 1% get it, schixoaffective disorder. Nobody seems to know how to accomodate it and nobody wants someone with it to be a 50K or 150K a year programmer with it. If only that job board worked, i tried searching jobs and waited over an hour for it to stop the circle spinning.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tensymbols 10y ago
Looks like in Firefox page completely disappears when you turn all three right side toggles on and there's no way to roll back.

303 points by therealcoffee 10y ago

This sounds like a cool idea, good luck! Am I right in thinking there's no jobs on there at the moment though, I couldn't seem to see any. Edit: Getting a DB error now, but could see the page before

therealcoffee 10y ago
Thanks for the feedback! You are correct, the board is empty as I have literally just launched it. :-) Getting DB errors also now, thinking it might be a traffic issue.
- benhoyt 10y ago
  I don't know if this was an official launch, but if you do have an official launch I think it'd be better to seed it by reaching out to some folks first. Even two or three postings before a launch event would have made it seem more complete.

milankragujevic 10y ago

It's offline... And powered by WordPress... > Error establishing a database connection

alkonaut 10y ago
I think we may have disabled it.
- therealcoffee 10y ago
  I am actually getting the same issue, intermittently. Is it just a traffic overload issue? Anything I can do to make this more robust? I was not getting this before sharing the site.
  - eli 10y ago
    Look into caching so that it does not need to hit the database for everything. Been years since I used WordPress but there was something like WP Super Cache that worked OK. Your web server (e.g. Nginix) can also be configured to cache pages, and there are entire servers dedicated to caching like Varnish. Be forewarned that caching and cache invalidation can be surprisingly tricky to get perfect. You also might just actually need a beefier server. But at the very least you should be able to serve the homepage, which doesn't change super often, to everyone. Congrats on having a site popular enough that you get to learn about a whole new world of tools and technologies!
    - therealcoffee 10y ago
      Thanks I will look into caching plugins, starting with Super Cache. Hope this can stabilise things a bit. If that does not work, will have to look into server options. Thank you for your help and encouragement! :-)
  - garysieling 10y ago
    If it's a wordpress site, I found the best thing for me was to set up Cloudflare in front of the site, because they can cache a lot of requests. The next best thing is making sure APC is set up on your server. I've also had success tuning settings in Apache to help with memory use, but that's a lot more time consuming.

gtirloni 10y ago

For your niche, you should run your website through a few of these checkers and make sure it passes with flying colors: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/

therealcoffee 10y ago
Thank you this is very helpful!
djKianoosh 10y ago
Also you might try this during development: http://khan.github.io/tota11y/ http://khan.github.io/tota11y/ we've started to use it on the main theme for CBP apps: https://github.com/US-CBP/cbp-theme https://github.com/US-CBP/cbp-theme and it helps catch a bunch of basic issues while developing.

ekarulf 10y ago

Cool! I would suggest changing the branding to "a simple job board for people with disabilities." For many people the disability is a part of who they are - it's not how they self identify. See some of the existing non-profits in this space like http://www.bestbuddies.org http://www.bestbuddies.org

sixstringtheory 10y ago
On the point of "disabled people" vs "people with disabilities" I have this conversation a lot with my wife, who is an Occupational Therapist and who first introduced me to the idea of people-first language. I think there's merit in the idea, but I'm not sure it's a settled issue. She's also fluent in American Sign Language and studied Deaf culture as an anthro undergrad, and they are one of several examples of groups who diametrically oppose people-first language: Deafness is a defining and inseparable part of who they are as a person. I would love to hear the opinions of other people on this board who live with Autism, blindness, para- or quadri-plegia, or other forms of disabilities on the matter, as I don't see myself as being able to have an authoritative opinion, as someone who does not live with disability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People-first_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People-first_language
- paulryanrogers 10y ago
  "Deafness is a defining and inseparable part of who they are as a person" Tangent: How true is that for people who become deaf at different stages of life besides birth?
  - sixstringtheory 10y ago
    That's a great question, and unfortunately we've reached the point where I'm afraid I can't speak authoritatively. I did a quick search regarding cultural vs. physical deafness, here are some interesting things I found: https://nad.org/issues/american-sign-language/community-and-culture-faq https://nad.org/issues/american-sign-language/community-and-... http://www.signwriting.org/about/questions/quest024.html http://www.signwriting.org/about/questions/quest024.html The reverse is also an interesting question: how does the Deaf community view people who seek to gain hearing through e.g. cochlear implants, like for a child born deaf? Answer: it's extremely controversial. It's an very interesting subject for me because I love thinking about language and how it shapes cognition and culture–and sign language is such a different paradigm than spoken or written languages. That being said I still only have a beginner's level understanding of Deaf culture, at least w.r.t. how far a hearing person could ever get. Edit: formatting

jukkakoskinen 10y ago

Nice idea. Can you tell a little about what got you started?

mettamage 10y ago

Curious question: how do you deal with people who post stuff that isn't relevant?

escapologybb 10y ago

Man, I'm quadriplegic and I had to set up my business as it was basically the only way I could get a job. People with severe disabilities don't tend to make the most reliable employees timekeeping wise because you just can't guarantee that you will be at a place at a given time, I cannot in any way guarantee that I will be fit for work at 9 AM on Monday morning, it's just the nature of the disability. And that's the same for most people with severe disabilities. That just won't fly with most employers. I'd be really interested where you've found a stock of sympathetic employers willing to deal with these issues, because I've not found many. Also, why separate out disabled people from "normal" people, I'm genuinely curious? I mean I appreciate the effort of you trying to find us work, but don't you see how you are coming at it from the wrong angle. If you are going to separate out disabled people from the rest of the job market, how about a board where disabled people post their skills, the hours they can guarantee per week to work and the wage they are willing to work for just like other niche job markets? What separates out this job market from the others in the space? Also, by disabled do you mean blind and deaf or do you mean anybody with any type of disability? The type of disability will have a huge impact on the type of job. You don't have any jobs listed so I can't get a handle on who exactly this is meant for you see. I'm not trying to be a dick, I'm really not and I'm sure this effort comes from a good place but if you haven't got a group of employers willing to employ disabled people then you are really going to struggle. I wish you luck. I have lots of questions, I may also have answers, hit me up if you want to chat.

extra88 10y ago
> Also, why separate out disabled people from "normal" people, I'm genuinely curious? Since, as you recognize, many employers are unprepared to even think about how a particular disability is not a barrier to a particular job or about accommodations that would enable someone to perform the job, there could be value to people with disabilities for a site where employers identify themselves as having thought about it. Many, if not most, jobs appear in more than one place so this can be another one. Still, I'm more inclined to prefer a job board for everyone that has options like Craigslist's "ok to highlight this job opening for persons with disabilities" checkbox [0]. [0] https://www.craigslist.org/about/disabilities https://www.craigslist.org/about/disabilities

mwcampbell 10y ago

As a person with a disability myself (legally blind), I have a couple of concerns with this idea. First, the category of people with disabilities is quite broad. There are not only different categories of disability, but also a broad spectrum of severity for any given disability. Why would an employer post to a job board for people with disabilities in general, except out of a misguided sense of charity, or perhaps to meet some kind of quota? And that brings me to the bigger concern: Why do people with disabilities need a special job board just for us anyway? Surely that is a failure to fully integrate us into mainstream society, which I think is ultimately the best thing for everyone. By the way, though I hate the clunkiness of terminology like "people with disabilities", I think it's justified in this case. For me, the word "disabled", particularly in the context of employment, has the connotation of being unable to be productive. Some people's disabilities are severe enough that that's true of them, but that's not all of us, not by a long shot. Maybe I'm being over-sensitive about that, but I'm just telling you how I see it, for what it's worth.

extra88 10y ago
Do you use a screenreader? I was looking at the Find Jobs page, which appears to trigger the search on any "on blur" event in the form, and thinking that this is a good case for using ARIA live regions [0]. I was also thinking that it would be better if it took a progressive enhancement approach and had a working Submit button to POST the form when JavaScript is not running but that's another matter. [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/ARIA_Live_Regions https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...
benhoyt 10y ago
Interesting perspective on the terms (in your last paragraph). I've long thought it's odd how this language has changed over the years. A long time ago a disabled person might have been called "retarded" -- that's probably the most offensive term of all now, but the literal meaning of the word itself is least offensive, simply meaning "slowed down". Then came "handicapped", which isn't used much anymore, but literally just means having some kind of restriction. Now we are much more enlightened and say "disabled" -- it's the least offensive term now, but if you take it literally that word is quite horrible, meaning "not working" or "incapacitated" or "turned off" or "unable to be used", as in "the bomb squad disabled the bomb". Why did we settle on a word that means "not working" for someone who has a handicap?

DanBC 10y ago

One of the forms mentions London, thus some UK advice. "handicareers" seems like a play on the handicapped word. You might need to know that word is strongly rejected by large numbers of the UK population. This is possibly going to attract strongly negative attention. You might want to link employers and potential employees to advice about Access to Work, and to best current practice about reasonable adjustments, and to advice about the Equality Act.

escapologybb 10y ago
This exactly. This was my first clue that this person probably wasn't from the UK. You're totally right, the word handicapped is definitely the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the name and it wasn't a nice association. But if they are not aiming at the UK market then there probably isn't a reason to change it, but if operating inside the UK then I think the name might be a real problem. It just makes me think of "HandiCapable" which is a horrible term. To be clear, I don't think the OP is trying to be offensive but inside the UK I think you might this kind of feedback quite a lot.

kaa2102 10y ago

I really LOVE this concept. I think it is much needed. I've seen studies of entire customer service departments staffed by disabled individuals who showed extreme patience and empathy with customers resulting in higher satisfaction. One consideration to improve the user experience is to make sure that the website is Section 508 Compliant (www.section508.gov) so that it is easier to access for individuals with hearing and visual disabilities.

extra88 10y ago
Section 508 is specifically for U.S. government work and rather outdated. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are much more useful [0] and if you meet all the success criteria for WCAG level AA, you should also meet Section 508 requirements (there may be one or two overly prescriptive details in 508 that may require tweaking to get to 100%). [0] https://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.php https://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.php

Goldenromeo 10y ago

good job, but please try to fix ssh. I tried accessing the https version of your site but it didn't work. First chrome complained it was unsafe, and later your host returned a generic page for new sites.

extra88 10y ago
I think you mean SSL or TLS, not SSH.

pg_is_a_butt 10y ago

discriminating against the those lacking in disabilities is still discrimination. you're all idiots.

thefaketea 10y ago

I think that it's a very interesting idea!

homero 10y ago

Love it

orionblastar 10y ago

I am mentally ill and disabled because of it. When companies have a disabled plan it is for people in wheelchairs, the blibd, and the deaf but not the mentally ill. I have good days and bad days with my mental illness and sometimes lose track of what I am doing if interrupted too much. I know I have to take interruptions from my work for help desk assistance and other things like team members. My mental illness has some things in common with high functioning autism, and bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia and is so rare that half of 1% get it, schixoaffective disorder. Nobody seems to know how to accomodate it and nobody wants someone with it to be a 50K or 150K a year programmer with it. If only that job board worked, i tried searching jobs and waited over an hour for it to stop the circle spinning.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

tensymbols 10y ago

Looks like in Firefox page completely disappears when you turn all three right side toggles on and there's no way to roll back.