Mark Bagshaw has two jobs. As Director Accessibility for IBM Australia & New Zealand, he travels Australia, New Zealand, Asia and abroad. In addition to his full IBM schedule, Bagshaw is an active, vocal advocate in the Australian community for people with disabilities and travels the country speaking on behalf of this cause.

Disabled himself in a diving accident at 16, Bagshaw has quadriplegia with no use of his legs and limited use of arms and hands. He gets around in a power wheelchair and drives a car equipped with hand controls.

"I'd say that for me as a person with a disability, the barriers are not primarily attitudinal but physical," explains Bagshaw. Bagshaw says he feels it's his responsibility to make people he meets feel comfortable with him. "People may not have direct experience with someone who has a disability. So it's up to me to put them at ease. I find that usually doesn't take long at all."

During his successful 22-year career with the company, accommodations have helped to make him more productive and his job easier. "IBM has offered me fantastic support -- the hardware I need and software like IBM's voice recognition product, ViaVoice," explains Bagshaw. IBM supplied his power wheelchair to help him move around the office quickly and efficiently. "The accommodations have always been made readily without a problem."

A seasoned traveller with over 50 trips each year, it's the physical challenges of navigating in a world not designed for a wheelchair that pose problems. "Even with the well-developed process I have when I travel, there are barriers to public transportation, hotel rooms, etc.," says Bagshaw.

And according to Bagshaw, it is these barriers that are, in part, standing in the way of integrating people with disabilities into the community and the workforce. As an advocate of change, Bagshaw's message is simple and effective: It makes good economic sense for every country to tap the talents of people with disabilities. The compelling reason for doing this is improving the economic bottom line.

"There are about 1 billion people with disabilities worldwide. They are taking part in the workforce at only half the rate of the general population. 17 million extra Americans, 2 million extra Britons and 1.2 million extra Australians could be working and want to work," he explains. "If you assign a productivity factor of $US21,000 for each of them and factor in savings on welfare payments, you get a net benefit of $900 billion that's not flowing into the US, UK and Australian economies."

According to Bagshaw, there's no one solution to getting people with disabilities into the workforce. "We need to treat disability as a 'whole of life' issue. We need to remove the infrastructure areas faced by people disabilities, empower them with hope and the knowledge to deal with their disability and we need to lift the community's expectations of them".

His proposal for three, closely-linked 'strategic interventions' involving engaging the business sector in producing products and services that remove infrastructure barriers, a lifelong learning approach to empowering people with disabilities and a community-wide marketing programme to lift community expectations has gained significant support at the highest levels.