[nfbcs] Questions Regarding Employment and Tools used in the Workplace

[John G. Heim]

I saw that somebody else responded about your accessibility issues 
themselves. So I'm going to respond regarding your general question 
about what to do if your company acquires inaccessible software.

First of all, this is a huge, huge problem  especially for computer 
professionals. I've know people who have just retired when their company 
switched to a development environment they couldn't use. i personally 
switched jobs, careers rereally, to avoid inaccessible software. I now 
do linux support/programming because there are far fewer accessibility 
issues.

There is a phenomena I call "getting backwatered". As a blind person, 
you never get the juicy assignments because new products are so seldom 
accessible. Gradually, your job is dealing with more and more obsolete 
systems until you are expendible. Then when layoffs come around, you're 
the one to go because you are, through no fault of your own, the least 
valuable employee.

My opinion is that it's not realistic to think you can get  your 
employer to take accessibility seriously. You can't say, "Lets not get 
this software because it's inaccessible to me." I worked for a 
university that is required by federal regulation to favor accessible 
software. If they are going to buy inaccessible software, they are 
supposed to have to formally justify it. But that has never happened in 
my entire time here. Everytime i ever even broached the subject I was 
met with a response somewhere between a shrug of the shoulders and 
outright hostility. And I was in a place where people are about as open 
minded as they come and where I could hardly have more clearly had the 
law on my side.  Managers are not going to change their minds about what 
software they want to use because of accessibility issues. You can 
forget that. It never happens.

My opinion is that the only realistic way to avoid getting backwatered 
is to choose a career path  to deliberately avoid it  You can hope to 
get lucky and get a boss that takes accessibility seriously. Or you can 
hope to get a job where the technology never changes or goes away. But I 
think taking accessibility into account when you choose your area of 
expertise is the only realistic way to make sure your career keeps 
moving forward. Linux   or database admin are  both good. There are 
probably a lot of other things that work too.  I know I'm suggesting you 
limit your career choices even further. I mean, stuff like driving a 
truck or flying airplanes are already out of the question for career 
choices.  But i think if you are blind, taking accessibility into 
account is very important when you look at what area of computing you 
want to get into.

On 07/31/13 22:28, Jordyn Castor wrote:
> Hello all,
> This summer I had the pleasure of working as an IT intern fixing accessibility defects on a company's website. This was my first job, and I just had some quick questions regarding what you've experienced in the workplace.
> What do you do if a tool used by the company is inaccessible? For example, the tool we use to enter our hours on our timesheet is completely unusable by a screen reader. I think it is a Java app or something.
> We also use a tool for code review which highlights code in different colors and associates the highlighted code somehow with comments made by reviewers. How would you deal with a situation like this?
> Also, is there a way to accessibly use the web developer tools to read the HTML for a specific link or web element in IE?
> When you are fixing something like accessibility defects in code, how do you efficiently go through someone else's code to find the errors when there are multiple files and a zillion lines of code? I need to find the places where HTML needs to be added so the screen reader reads content properly.
> I really do appreciate any help and insight you can give me. If these questions are extremely broad, please let me know. This summer we did paired programming, so my partner and I figured out things together. However, when that's not the case,I want to be as efficient, independent, and productive at my job as I possibly can.
> Thank you,
> Jordyn
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John G. Heim, 608-263-4189, jheim at math.wisc.edu