lukeslp/accessibility-atlas

Accessibility Atlas

42 datasets covering disability demographics, employment gaps, web accessibility compliance, assistive technology patents, special education, healthcare, housing discrimination, transportation, government benefits, and more -- across 15 categories.

Built for researchers, journalists, policy analysts, and anyone building tools for disabled communities.

What's Inside

US Disability Demographics (Census Bureau)

8 datasets from the American Community Survey covering county, state, and national disability rates.

• County-level: 3,100+ counties (ACS 5-Year 2022)
• State-level: 50 states + DC (ACS 5-Year 2021)
• National trends: 13-year trend (11.9% to 13.6%)
• Demographics: by race, age, sex, and 6 disability types

Disability Employment

4 datasets on the employment gap, discrimination charges, and workplace accommodations.

• BLS employment/unemployment by disability status
• FRED 16-year time series (gap narrowing from 40pp to 37pp)
• 679,637 ADA discrimination charges (1992-2024)
• JAN accommodation cost data (58.7% cost $0)

Special Education (IDEA)

6 datasets from the National Center for Education Statistics on 7.5M students served under IDEA Part B.

• 13 disability categories
• 51 states
• 1976-2023 historical data
• Demographics, environments, state-level breakdowns

Web Accessibility

5 datasets on WCAG compliance, lawsuits, screen reader usage, and Section 508.

• WebAIM Million: 94.8% of top 1M pages fail WCAG
• Screen reader survey: 1,539 respondents
• ADA digital lawsuits: 814 (2017) to ~4,000 (2024)
• Section 508: 245 federal entities, only 23% conform
• HTTP Archive a11y trends 2019-2024

International Disability

8 datasets covering 194+ countries.

• WHO: disability prevalence, DALYs/YLDs, healthy life expectancy
• OECD: 34 countries, prevalence/employment/spending
• Eurostat: 36 EU countries
• World Bank: 10 socioeconomic indicators
• UN CRPD: 199 countries ratification status

Government Benefits

• SSA: SSDI/SSI annual data (7.3M + 4.9M beneficiaries)
• VA: disability compensation by state (5.7M+ veterans)

Healthcare & Mental Health

• CMS: Medicaid disability enrollment (10.2M enrollees)
• SAMHSA: mental health prevalence 2008-2023

Housing, Transportation, Education

• HUD: fair housing complaints (disability is #1 basis, ~55%)
• NTD: paratransit ridership/costs ($40-50/trip)
• CRDC: Section 504, restraint/seclusion, discipline

Assistive Technology Patents

• WIPO: patent data 1985-2026 (10 → 519 patents)

Visual Accessibility

• VizWiz: 4,319 VQA pairs from blind users (CC BY 4.0)

Key Findings

44.1 million Americans (13.4%) have a disability (Census 2022). Rate rose from 11.9% (2010) to 13.6% (2023). Ambulatory (6.7%) and cognitive (5.7%) are most common.

The employment gap is massive. 24.5% labor force participation (disabled) vs ~67% (non-disabled). OECD average gap: 34 percentage points.

Workplace accommodations are cheap. 58.7% cost nothing. Median: $300. Yet 679,637 ADA charges filed since 1992.

The web is still broken. 94.8% of top 1M websites fail WCAG. Average: 51 errors/page.

Disability is #1 basis for fair housing complaints (~55% of all HUD complaints).

Special education is growing. 15.2% of public school students now served under IDEA. Autism grew 8.5x since 2000.

Globally, 1.3 billion people (16%) live with significant disability (WHO). 190 countries signed UN CRPD.

Notebooks

10 Jupyter notebooks in notebooks/ that load the data, run analysis, and produce charts:

• census_disability_demographics.ipynb: Maps, trends, demographic breakdowns
• disability_employment.ipynb: Employment gap over time, discrimination charges
• web_accessibility.ipynb: WCAG failure trends, screen reader market share
• international_disability.ipynb: Cross-country comparisons
• special_education_idea.ipynb: Enrollment trends, discipline disparities
• government_benefits.ipynb: Benefit trends, state-level processing
• healthcare_mental_health.ipynb: Enrollment, treatment gaps
• housing_transportation_education.ipynb: Fair housing, transit costs
• assistive_technology.ipynb: Patent growth by category
• sign_language_vision_aac.ipynb: Visual question answering

Plus accessibility_atlas_demo.ipynb in root as a quick-start sampler.

Data Sources & Licenses

Most data is from US government (public domain) and international organizations (open licenses). Individual datasets carry their own licenses:

Source	License
US Census Bureau	Public Domain
Bureau of Labor Statistics	Public Domain
US Dept. of Education	Public Domain
SSA, VA, CMS, SAMHSA	Public Domain
HUD, NTD, CRDC	Public Domain
WHO Global Health Observatory	CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO
OECD, Eurostat, World Bank	Open licenses (see sources)
WebAIM	Fair use (structured summaries)
VizWiz	CC BY 4.0

Full source table with URLs in main README.

File Format

Data files: JSON, CSV, Excel (XLSX) Notebooks: Jupyter (.ipynb)

About

Part of the Data Trove collection. I built this because disability data is scattered across dozens of federal agencies, international organizations, and advocacy groups. Having it all in one place -- with consistent formatting and analysis notebooks -- makes it actually usable.

Luke Steuber • lukesteuber.com • @lukesteuber.com

Citation

@misc{steuber2026accessibility,
  title={Accessibility Atlas: Disability Demographics and Web Accessibility Dataset Collection},
  author={Steuber, Luke},
  year={2026},
  url={https://huggingface.co/datasets/lukeslp/accessibility-atlas}
}

License

MIT License for the collection. Individual datasets have their own licenses (see table above). Public domain data can be used freely. WHO data is CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO. VizWiz is CC BY 4.0.