The Internet can make the world more accessible for people with disabilities if they have access

to the Internet.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech, I'm Megan McCarty-Karino.

Earlier this week, Vice President Kamala Harris was in South Carolina, touting the administration's

push to expand affordable high-speed Internet there, with programs funded by the bipartisan

infrastructure bill.

Tens of millions of Americans still don't have access to broadband Internet, and the

problem is particularly acute for people with disabilities, according to recent research

from the Urban Institute.

Senior fellow John Schwabich co-authored that report and found areas with the highest

share of residents claiming disability insurance, we're also lagging in Internet access.

We expected that our finding would just reflect what we kind of all know, that rural areas

of the country tend to have less access or lower speeds on the Internet than non-rural

counties.

And yet what we found was that the difference between counties that have higher rates

of disability insurance receipt and counties that have lower percentages of people who

have disability receipt, the gap between the broadband access between those two types

of counties was 2.2 percentage points, and we thought that would drive everything.

But actually we also find in non-rural counties that there's a gap between counties that

have high disability receipt and lower disability receipt and that gap a little bit smaller is

about 1.2 percentage points, but still significant and significant enough that this rural urban

broadband gap is not what drove the whole thing, there's something else going on.

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