[blindlaw] Confidential Story, state computer system

[Ford, Tim (CDPH-OLS)]

Hi All,

Before I go any further, I would prefer that the following be kept among
ourselves and not forwarded to other lists; I could perhaps get a bit of
flack for telling what is essentially an inside story.  So if you cannot
honor that, please stop here and delete this message.

I have a little story from here in California state government that
bears on this issue of inaccessible state government computer systems.

Back some years ago, we started having to use a new travel claim system.
That same process is also for reimbursement of small expenditures that
an employee paid for out of their own money but was for official
purposes.

Anyway, the system was not accessible.  Our state rehabilitation agency
solved the problem by sticking with its own accessible system, but that
left behind blind employees like myself who worked for other agencies.

So I started checking in to it, and after a number of non-returned phone
calls, I finally got the name and contact information for the head guy.
He was very candid, and explained the significant efforts he had gone to
trying to figure out a solution to the access problem.  After our phone
call, he even went so far as to contract with a blind computer tech
expert I referred him to, and that expert verified that the access
problem could not be solved due to fundamental limitations inherent in
the old system.

I put the matter aside, and several months later, the guy called me out
of the blue to tell me that they had just received permission to fund a
purchase of the newer generation of the travel claim software, and that
fixing the accessibility problem was the specific goal of the purchase.
When I asked him how much it cost, the price was somewhere around
$700,000.  I choked a bit, and told him I felt a bit bad that the fix
was so expensive.  He chuckled a bit, then told me that he had been
trying for several years to get the new software system, for all sorts
of non-accessible reasons, and had always been refused.  However, when
after my phone call he raised the access issue, the purchase was
approved.  So he thanked me very much for giving him the idea of the
approach that actually turned the tide.  

Now to put this all in perspective.  This new computer system was for
all of state government, several hundred thousand users in all, and the
upgrade was sorely needed since the base platform was over a decade old,
even prior to Windows XP, and the cost per user was something like three
dollars.  So this turned out to be a win-win situation, and in this
case, I found the irony of the situation to make for a good yarn, and
that as they say, is the rest of the story.

Sincerely,
Tim Ford