Notes to Submission to the Productivity Commission Inquiry into the ...

Externalities/Public Goods: Inadequate Supply of Design FeaturesDesign features that ignore the needs of people with impairments mean that considerabletime is wasted overcoming design obstacles. When a person spends time looking for anentrance, or using an indirect path of travel, or negotiating the quality of a service, theywould presumably prefer spending their time in some leisure activity or in employment.In the extreme, design features that ignore the needs of people with impairments maymean non-participation in the workforce. For when a person misses a job interviewbecause their assistant or taxi is late or because an advertisement is not advertised inaccessible format or because the employment criteria have ignored disability issues, theprobability of finding a job is reduced.Design features may be physical or administrative. Examples of inaccessible physicaldesign features are obvious enough and relate particularly to people with visibledisabilities e.g. lack of an access ramp, non-Braille buttons, lack of a hearing loop in apublic address system etc. Inaccessible administrative design is less obvious, but it can beas disabling as inaccessible physical design. Administrative design features can relate tomethods (e.g. allocating queues into a cinema with a limited number of well-locatedaccessible seats on a ‘first-come first-served’ basis) or rules (e.g. inflexible schedules androsters that do not account for disability episodes).Cost minimising firms and organisations will only incorporate accessibility designfeatures into their goods and services if they believe the cost of the specific additionaldesign is less than the expected revenue they derive from the design. This is consistentwith a socially efficient outcome only if the design feature produces no external effects.Where the lack of a design feature leads to a loss of valuable time by a person with adisability or an assistant, there is an external effect which in general the supplier of thedesign feature does not take into account when deciding whether or not to incorporate thedesign feature into their product. Thus for example, a cinema proprietor will ensureaccess into the cinema only if they expect that the expected capitalised profit to be madefrom wheelchair users is likely to be greater than the cost of ensuring access. The timesaved in not having to go to a less preferred cinema location, or in not having to have anassistant pull the wheelchair up the stairs is ignored by the cinema proprietor even thoughthe time saved by the ramp are social benefits.There are three types of externalities relevant to people with disabilities and the DDA:• ‘direct externalities’ affect people with disabilities;• ‘network externalities’ are due to the interdependence of demand for varioustypes of goods and services of interest to people with disabilities.• ‘associate externalities’ affect the associates of people with disabilities; andThese three types of externalities can be illustrated by considering an access ramp forwheelchair users and a wheelchair-accessible transport system:• without a ramp, a wheelchair user might not be able to attend an interview for ajob or might have to spend time overcoming an obstacle (direct externality);17