[nfbcs] Helping a software engineer keep his job

[Graham Mehl]

Hi Fellow NFBCS listers,

As Gary Wunder indicated I was monitoring the various posts in this thread.
There has been a lot of good information discussed. I would have posted
sooner, but I had a couple personal matters to drew my attention like trying
to find a new job position before getting laid off.  Now that I have secured
employment I can provide my post.  Thank you for your patience and
understanding.

I have been trying to rack my brain on what is performance and how I can
change or improve my performance at work.  

 

Medical background:

- anaridia since birth; causes extreme sensitivity to light (think bright
white computer screens)

- functional sight until 2006

- right eye has light perception only due to retina detachments

- left eye has 20/200 vision on good days; averages 20/400

- left eye has a k-pro (artificial cornea)

- high contrast screen needed to read; 10x handheld magnifier sometimes but
barely helps

- I can see some shades of colors but am not color blind

Personality background:

- strong willed, 

- hard worker, 

- perfectionist, 

- detail oriented, 

- meticulous, 

- relentless in activities I am passionate about, 

- have perseverance,

- analytical, 

- strong faith in God, 

- does not like [major] change, 

- enjoys performing community service,

- received the Boy Scout Eagle Scout award, 

- earned a masters degree in computer science specializing in software
engineering, 

- was an avid hiker when I had more time, enjoy doing genealogy, 

- am married and have two young (kindergarten and preschool) children, 

- have been employed by the same company for the last 17 years. 

 

My Technological environment and challenges:

I am primarily a java application developer, and have done 5 years of C
programming. I feel my area of expertise is in J2EE applications
development, a variety of databases, and a mastery of shell scripting. And
as a means to an end, I have done some web development. I also have
maintained, configured, deployed apache and tomcat web servers. For a short
period of time I developed Weblogic applications too. I have programmed on
Solaris, Linux (Typically Red Hat or CentOS), and windows platforms where
the applications were deployed to the same set of platforms. 

 

What tools do I use? 

- With doing java development the preferred tool by peers is the IDE
Eclipse. Eclipse has a few plug-ins that help with coding standards and
software build and CM tools. 

- text editors vi and emacs - both not very screen reader friendly.  

- notepad as a scratch pad for things usually with performing email tasks
and status reports and not necessarily for coding. 

- build tools ANT and Maven and the old fashion manual way with java
commands. 

- CM tools are SCCS, CVS, subversion (SVN), git. 

- Software ticket tracking tools include Track, VersionOne, and Jira. I have
used HTML, wiki and confluence for documentation . 

- IE and Firefox web browsers depending on what platform I was developing on
and application restrictions.  

- Some projects have used IM chat tools, like Microsoft Lync, heavily for
team communication and user support. 

- Pageant to load my PKI certificates for single sign in. 

- Putty and SSH and remote desktop Console (to connect with RFPs and VDIs)
tools to remote connect to remote VMs. 

- Some experimentation with cygwin. 

 

My job position requires me to use Microsoft Office products like Outlook,
Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, and to be able to read PDF files usually with
Adobe Reader. These tools, except for cygwin, are tools my peers and I use
on a regular basis if not daily. 

 

I more often then not use my vision and a mouse with a magnified screen. 

 

More and more development is being done in VM (virtual Machines). The
machine on my desk is a windows machine and I have to remote to a Linux
machine. In order to connect to remote systems, a secure connection is
required, typically using SSH technology and PKI certificates. 

 

A number of projects I have worked on are moving to a thin client
environment. The IT group providing the VMs in the thin client environment
do not want to put the JAWS software on the image load due to the increased
size of the image load. JAWS supports the ability to have two JAWS instances
to communicate between each other such that screen on the remote system can
have its screen read to an individual. Unfortunately, the remote system
needs to be persistent with JAWS running. Having a persistent VM sort of
defeats the purpose of a thin client environment. So the IT group does not
want to support VMs that are persistent. 

 

Because of what I work with and where I work, closed networks and can only
be connected to at work locations. Work / files cannot be taken home and
worked on and brought back. Any work performed for the purposes of the
contract has to be billed to the customer. I mention this only because there
were a few posts that indicated putting in a few extra hours to compensate
for our disability accommodations. There was a sub-thread about how much
time should a person with a disability put in. I too find myself falling
back to my limited vision.   

 

I am a salary employee and get paid for my 40 hour work week, and any time I
put in above the 40 hours I personally do not get paid for, but customer
gets billed all the hours. The customer wants the task / job done and does
not care if the person working the task is disabled or not. At some point
the customer will care how much they are paying for stuff. 

 

Earlier I mentioned closed network systems, which supports general users,
developers,  and operational teams. More often than not I also have a second
system at my desk that allows me to access  the Internet which, to be clear,
this system does not have connectivity to the closed network.

To date my company has purchased or provided

- a 30 inch Dell monitor, 

- a CCTV for reading hardcopy material, 

- Zoomtext 9.1 Magnifier / Reader software, 

- 3 user licenses of JAWS software (which I am not very proficient at
using), 

- Kurzweil 1000,

- a Cannon flat bed scanner that will eventually replace the CCTV when my
vision is completely gone

- a company owned laptop, so I can go home and do other company required
activities and still get company IT support when needed, 

- a second scanner to use with the laptop, 

-a  standard keyboard with a smart card reader to connect with the laptop. 

My company uses RSA id tokens to authenticate, which of course is digital.
The only alternative solution for this is to use a company issued smart
card, hence the card reader keyboard. 

 

There is no training mentioned for these tools, so I have had to figure it
out on my own. To my knowledge there is no organization within my company
that solely supports disabilities. The customer does have such a
organization, but due to legal and contractual reasons as a contractor I
have limited access and support from them. Generally I am on my own unless I
I can personally find someone else that is disabled that can help me.

So now I circle back to how do I perform better and remain competitive with
my sighted peers? I am struggling to keep up with peers because of the time
I spend figuring out things on my own, using systems that are not completely
compatible with accessibility tools, and time needed to learn accessible
tools and shortcuts.  I just don't seem to have enough hours in a day on the
job or at home.

 

--

Graham Mehl

blind at trailstone.com