AFB American Foundation for the Blind™

Paul Schroeder's Remarks at
“Harnessing Technology to Expand Employment Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities”

Cornell University Disability Employment Policy Forum,
Co-sponsored by the American Association of People with Disabilities
June 8, 2007, at the Hall of States, Washington, D.C.

[Paul Schroeder is the Vice President of Programs and Policy for the American Foundation for the Blind, Washington, D.C. This text is was originally provided in a rough draft format from the VLI Reporting Communication Access Realtime Translation, CART, transcript. CART is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. Therefore, the transcript was then corrected to ensure an understandable account of the proceedings.]

On Accessible Technology and Employment for People with Vision Loss

We recognize the critical role that information technology plays in employment at the American Foundation for the Blind, and we did this by establishing our center called the Technology and Employment Center, based in Huntington, West Virginia. That is where we are focusing now on the issues around access to technology and how that then in turn affords access to employment.

We are spending a fair amount of our time on trying to help manufacturers, designers, et cetera, improve the accessibility of their technology for people who are blind or visually impaired. I also want to stress that at our Technology and Employment Center we have a program called Career Connect, and I will be remiss if I didn't spend at least a second doing a commercial for Career Connect. It is our online set of resources for job seekers with vision loss, and includes professionals who provide services to this group. It also includes employers who themselves should be, or hopefully are, interested in accessibility, employment, et cetera.

AFB's Career Connect

One of the things that I like to tell people about Career Connect, especially for employers is that it is a place to go and ask those questions that you probably are or perhaps should be too embarrassed to ask the applicant sitting in front of you. Questions like “How will you find the bathroom?” Also, questions like “how will you get to work?” Believe it or not, we get these questions.

The truth is the employer has these questions in their mind and going to a place like Career Connect provides the good, anonymous opportunity to be able to look and get answers to some of those kinds of questions: E.gs.

• How do blind people get around independently?
• What kind of technologies are available to make the workplace accessible?
• How might people get access to these technologies?

This is all at our website AFB.ORG and you can find Career Connect on that website. You can also find a wealth of material that we have published and developed around technology, particularly technology in employment. This is found frequently in our publication known as "Access World" which is a web-based magazine.

Information Technology and Assistive Technology

I am often chided by my friends in the rehabilitation arena for sometimes getting too excited about the role of information technology (IT) and all that it has meant for people who are blind and visually impaired in employment. For me, it is hard to overstate the benefits of IT-based employment opportunities for people with vision loss. But it does bear in reminding, and I think we would all agree that as beneficial as information technology is, of course there are many factors that are critical in determining whether or not employment is going to be successful for somebody with a disability. Information technology and all of the issues around it are simply some of the factors.

Certainly, improvements in assistive technology and computer-based hardware and software have all led to enormous expansion and opportunities in employment for people with vision loss. The advent of sophisticated screen reading software and screen access software, synthesized speech, refreshable Braille displays, video magnifiers and on and on, all of these have been part of enabling individuals with individual vision loss to participate in this new technology-based employment revolution, and that is whether it is entry-level positions or top management.

However, all is not particularly smooth at the intersection of technology, telecommunications, and employment. Jobs often feel very precarious and many feel that jobs are out of reach because of barriers in the technology environment. We see several sets of barriers:

1. The first one is the assistive technology (AT) and information technology interface, or AT-IT interface. When we queried our Career Connect mentors -- one of the powerful aspects of our employment program is its database of mentors of individuals with vision loss who are working, who are providing time and support to individuals with vision loss who are job seeking -- when we queried these mentors about their concerns with technology and employment, we received a very interesting set of responses back from them. One of these had to do with the problem of assistive technology keeping up with changes in main stream technology. Here is the problem: The IT applications or even websites that people depend on as we just heard about, for example, for online training, are in many cases accessible one day and seemingly inaccessible the next because of the rapid changes that are taking place in information technology and in web design. Similarly, proprietary software applications often interfere with or are simply not accessible for the assistive technology that people with vision loss need to use. These proprietary softwares often require a fair amount of effort if they are made accessible at all. I want to stress four particular trends in this area:
   
   
   1. increased use of customized applications delivered in a network environment seem to cause a great deal of trouble for the assistive technology used by individuals in the employment setting;
      
      
   2. The migration to non-Windows operating systems such as MAC, Linux, et cetera. This is a little bit of geek speak here, but there has been a tremendous amount of work here to make computers running in the Windows application fairly accessible. The other systems, MAC and Linux in particular, there is not so much work being done in that area and the accessibility is precarious, if it is available at all;
      
      
   3. The increasing pace of new standards that I have already alluded to the rapidly changing world of the IT and of web design make accessibility can go away in a matter of moments. One fears this.
      
      
   4. The increased use of online, web-based training et cetera, are causing lots of concerns. Training tends not to be very accessible on the web. And when you are working in secured web environments, often for a blind person you'll get thrown away every time because you can’t see the security words that are in a website.¹
      
      
2. The second set of barriers I want to focus on is the information technology itself. This is the common place equipment. I'll mention three areas in particular:
   
   
   1. Office equipment. We did a lot of work at AFB Tech looking at multifunctional office equipment, for example, the document centers that copy, print, fax, et cetera. We did this because employers said this is one of the challenges they were facing in their work sites for people with vision loss and how to make these accessible. The problem with these systems is they depend on small LCD displays. If you have some vision loss, these are obviously not readable at all. There is typically no speech output built in with these devices. The problem also has to do with the input into these devices typically. I want to recognize that we recently gave Canon an Access Award for the work they had done in making a multifunctional device of this sort accessible out of the box, and building in the accessibility. However, even the small desk top functional systems, which are driven by software, have proven to be problematic for some of the reasons I said before. In particular, the proprietary software that is often used does not work well with the screen readers that people use with their computers.
      
      
   2. Telecommunications. This is an interesting environment and I'm going to touch on this at the end when I talk a little bit about policy stuff. But suffice to say, that the business telecommunications environment has gotten to be far more complicated and far less accessible for people with vision loss as the telecommunications equipment itself has become more complex and typically not very accessible for people with vision loss. Lastly, but not least, in this area, are the inaccessible personal digital assistants (PDAs), the Blackberries that many of you are carrying around. I think those of us who want Blackberries are the ones who can't have them and those of you that have them would love to get rid of them. Nonetheless, the problem is that PDAs are generally not accessible. They are certainly not accessible out of the box, due to the very small displays, and are not very readable, and there is a limited means of doing any input even if there were accessible output of what is on the display for somebody with vision loss. There have been some third-party elements who have developed software that would make PDAs accessible but these efforts, while promising, are still expensive, and complex, and not proven yet. This is not a trivial matter as the amount of dependence on Blackberries and the Blackberry Pilot form is critical in the workplace. There really is not a suitable alternative for people with vision loss that has been developed. Although we keep hearing tantalizing reports of possibilities.
      
      
   3. Training is the third barrier. I want to just take a quick moment to mention this. We often forget the importance of training. Assistive technology is complicated and complex to use. It is not an easy environment in many cases, especially if one has to keep up with constant changes in the workplace such as the new information technology that you're trying to access with your AT. Or if you are trying to use an independent piece of assistive technology like the Notetaker. Yet the critical importance of training, training for people with disabilities is inconsistent and often meager in terms of its availability and accessibility. Similarly, IT departments lack the information that they need. We queried our Career Connect mentors on this and received many responses on this topic; that is, IT departments generally don't know very much if anything about assistive technology. They make changes really without regard to their users and they simply don't know how to incorporate AT into the changes to the information technology network in the workplace environment.
      
      
3. The last barrier is cost. While for information technology in the mainstream, costs have dropped, significantly as capacity has increased, costs for assistive technology have tended actually to increase. Yes, capacity has increased also. No, for instance, it is not unlikely for a screen reader to cost as much or more to the computer to which it provides access! Similarly, I mentioned the beginning, the topic of third-party access to personal digital assistants; the cost for the screen reading software, the key board and the Braille display that one might need for these, they far outstrip the reader itself. Braille note takers can easily cost more than $6,000. This, of course, makes Assistive Technology prohibitively expensive for individuals, but also creates stress in the employment setting. Many times we hear about debates between employers and the rehabilitation industry, about who is actually going to bear the cost for accommodations. We clearly note that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is clear on this point but, nonetheless, there is a lot of debate about who bears the cost.

Recommendations

First of all, it strikes me every time I look at this employment issue, I'm surprised at the lack of research that is been done. This is to look in a hard-headed way at the role of technology and accommodations in occupations that are now highly used in the labor market, i.e., occupations that show high employment numbers in the labor market. I do not believe that we have done enough research to look at the role of technology and accommodations in those occupations as well as looking at occupations where there is high growth. I hope that is something we can address.

Secondly, while there are some wonderful tax credits and changes in the tax code that have made it possible for employers to be able to receive incentives for accommodations, I think there is always scrutiny and that the tax code should be keeping up with the accommodations. Also there needs to be more done to be sure that in fact employers know about them and can easily receive these incentives.

Thirdly, to develop assistive technology so that we can improve the challenge of assistive technology in keeping up with the changes in information technology.

Fourthly, it is an odd situation that we have telecommunications, which is a highly regulated environment, and that has an accessibility requirement built into it, i.e., Section 255 of the Communications Act, whereas, in contrast, the rest of the work site world, the predominant part of the world of work, the computers and the other equipment used, has no regulatory mandate for accessibility! The closest that we come of course is Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act which is indirect at best. I of course am often accused of saying that there is a policy for every problem and in fact that may be true, but it certainly seems as though we ought to be investigating (i) how we can ensure that the workplace is accessible and (ii) that the information technology used in the workplace is accessible. And, if it has to come to mandates, then that is perhaps something that we should be looking at, that is, how to make a policy work in that kind of environment.

Lastly, is the importance of training and information, especially for rehabilitation professionals. The Job Accommodation Network (JAN) is a wonderful tool and I want to make sure that employers know about it. But, we also need to make sure that rehabilitation professionals have competent sources of information and training on assistive technology because in many ways it is the rehabilitation professional and the individual employee with a disability who are really going to be looked to as the experts on how to make the work site accessible. We have got to make sure that these individuals are equipped as much as we possibly can with the information they need in a timely basis.

Paul Schroeder can be reached at the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), 820 First St NE, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20002. Tel 202-408-0200; Fax: 202-289-7880; Email pws@afb.net