Website For People With
Disability—DisabilityInfo.Gov—Celebrates First Year of Operation with
More Than 1.6 Million Visitors

WASHINGTON—Calling it “Yet another example of President George Bush’s deep commitment to making government easily accessible to all Americans,” Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao hailed the one-year anniversary of DisabilityInfo.Gov, a comprehensive Federal web site, managed by the Labor Department, with one-stop access to governmental disability information.

“DisabilityInfo.Gov provides Americans with disabilities a direct and easy connection to information and resources they need to become full participants in the 21st Century workforce,” Secretary Chao said. “I am so pleased with the results of the site, for in the past year, DisabilityInfo.Gov has had more than 1.6 million unique visitors who have come from 165 countries,” she said.

Assistant Secretary Roy Grizzard, who heads the Office of Disability Employment Policy, the managing agency for the site, said “This citizen-centered site successfully provides people with disabilities with a single online portal for Government information and resources related to disabilities and to the New Freedom Initiative.”

Since its October 16, 2002 launch, DisabilityInfo.Gov has averaged almost 5,000 visitors per day, with the most popular content topics accessed including income, employment, health, housing, education, transportation, and technology. Each visit averages almost eight minutes in duration, according to site statistics, and visitors have come from as far away as the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Korea, Germany and China. In all, the site has achieved almost 31 million “hits.”

Background: As part of the New Freedom Initiative, and in an effort to remove barriers for people with disabilities, President Bush on August 28, 2002, issued an Executive Memorandum directing Federal agencies to work together and develop a comprehensive Federal web site with one-stop access to governmental disability information. Two months later, DisabilityInfo.Gov was launched.

It is the result of a collaborative effort across multiple federal agencies and contains information on civil rights, education, employment, job accommodations, housing, technology, transportation, Medicaid and Medicare, and even emergency preparedness. The site is designed to be a single point of entry to access high-quality governmental services and information relevant to people with disabilities, their families, employers, and service providers. The President selected the Labor Department's Office of Disability Employment Policy to lead the effort to establish and manage DisabilityInfo.Gov, with ongoing content development shared by a myriad of government agencies.

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Archived News Release — Caution: Information may be out of date.