Anne Heelan, chief excutive of Ahead, an organisation that's devoted to placing people with disabilities in the workforce, witnesses even more powerful mind changing moments in the course of her work.

Those moments usually happen two weeks into a work placement programme her organisation runs with a group of private companies and the civil service.

It's the moment when the employer suddenly stops seeing the disability in the graduate and simply recognises the competence of a fellow worker who just happens to be blind or sitting in a wheelchair. The perception shift for the employer is every bit as dramatic as the Ambiguous Vase Illusion. Unexpectedly, the graduate's disability recedes into the background and his/her humanity and ability to do the job move centre stage. One minute the employer is looking at a blind man/woman and thinking of him/her as a potential problem; the next minute, he's treating the same person exactly like everybody else and quietly wondering why the graduate ever found it so difficult to get a job in the first place. Such moments of transformation are contingent, however, on the graduate's ability to do the job. Companies aren't charities and regardless of the sympathy evoked by the person's disability, the bottom line for the boss has to be competence.

"It's never about lowering the bar in terms of performance. Employers aren't interested in that and neither are people with disabilities, " says Anne Heelan. Today, with the assistance of special computer software and minor adjustments to the workplace, many highly qualified people with disabilities are able to perform on an equal footing with their able-bodied colleagues.

The shame is that so few of them ever get the chance. While the number of students with disabilities going through third level education has risen from approximately 400 ten years ago to an estimated 3,000 today, the increase is not reflected in the jobs market. People with disabilities are two and a half times less likely to have a job than non-disabled people.

Despite equality legislation, plenty of barriers and prejudices still exist to prevent graduates with disabilities getting work.

Unfortunately, the biggest obstacles are often unconscious stereotypical assumptions by some employers who fail to see the potential behind the disability.

While job-hunting is difficult enough for able-bodied graduates, imagine what it's like to arrive for an interview in a wheelchair, clutching a white cane or speaking with an obvious impediment. In that context, the fact that you hold a first class honours degree in computer science often gets overlooked.

Then there are the graduates with hidden or non-visible disabilities such as dyslexia, epilepsy, Asperger's Syndrome and mental health problems who choose not to disclose their disability to employers. (Research shows the number who don't tell is as high as 80%. ) Instead they struggle quietly to get by when an open attitude by both employer and employee would be more productive for everyone.

Even in this age of political correctness, bright people with visible or non-visible disabilities who want to train as national school teachers are informed by the Department of Education's application form that before any candidate can be admitted the medical officer must: "fcertify that he is of sound and healthy constitution and free from any physical or mental defects likely to impair his usefulness as a teacher."

Apart from the form being sexist the use of the word "defects" is insulting to people with disabilities and indicative of the way language can be used carelessly to categorise, label and enforce stereotypes.

Changing attitudes won't happen by itself and that's why Ahead acts as a bridge between employers on the one hand who need highly qualified workers and graduates with disabilities on the other hand who have been written off because of misconceptions about their condition. Two years ago it set up a work placement programme in partnership with large companies including IBM, Bank of Ireland, Hamilton Osborne King, The Civil Service, FAS, Irish Life & Permanent, DCU and others.

Fifty graduates, many with severe disabilities, were given work placements with the dedicated companies. Mentors (unpaid, voluntary employees in the companies where the graduates were placed) were used to ease the transition for the graduates into mainstream employment. The programme was a resounding success with 26 out of the 50 graduates now in full time jobs. Only two didn't work out and the remaining 22 are awaiting the outcome of job applications or exam results.

One of the programme participants, a blind graduate from DCU, who was unemployed for six years, is now working in the civil service, writing speeches for a government minister.

Graduates with disabilities just want a chance to show what they can do and work placement schemes with companies whose management are prepared to engage with an open mind are proving an effective way to tap a talent bank that has been ignored for far too long.