Business leaders will be urged to employ people with disabilities when a Minister visits the city to launch a new campaign today.
Work and Pensions Minister Anne McGuire is promoting the campaign, which is backed by Birmingham Chamber of Commerce.
She claimed that businesses were missing out on high quality staff because of ignorance about what disabled people can do in the workplace.
Very few employers consciously discriminated against disabled people, she said.
But others simply failed to consider how they could make the recruitment process fairer.
Employers now have a legal duty to make reasonable adjustments to workplaces to make them accessible to disabled people, as a result of the Disability Discrimination Act 2005.
The campaign will include advertising in newspapers and business publications, and on posters in Birmingham, Coventry, Hereford, Nuneaton, Shropshire, Stoke-on-Trent, Wolverhampton and Worcester.
It will focus on the achievements of specific disabled people in work, in an attempt to convince employers that people with disabilities can be the right choice for the job.
Mrs McGuire, said: "Almost 50 per cent of disabled people of working age in Britain are not in work.
"It is in the interests of everyone; individuals, businesses and society as a whole, that the number of disabled people in the workplace increases. For individuals, being in work is important for their health, well-being and standard of living.
"For businesses, it's vital that they find the right person for the job. For the economy, the more people in work the better.
"I want to encourage employers in the West Midlands to make sure they recruit the right person for the job - you could lose out on the ideal candidate because you make false assumptions based on their disability. I hope they will find this campaign helps them challenge some of their views to help their business thrive."
She added: "All employers have a legal responsibility under the Disability Discrimination Act to make reasonable adjustments for disabled applicants and employees. This may sound onerous but in many cases it costs nothing or very little. For example, the most common adjustment is to allow flexible working."
