[NFBCS] The Fine Line Between Reasonable Versus Unreasonable Accommodations
Steve Shelton
stevesheltonokc at gmail.com
Sat Sep 3 02:15:07 UTC 2022
You are absolutely correct, Curtis!. I worked in corporate IT for 43 years.
I always believed it was my responsibility to solve my accessibility
needs. My employers were always willing to provide any assistive technology
I requested, but they never told me how to do my job using AT.
Regards,
Steve Shelton
-----Original Message-----
From: NFBCS <nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Curtis Chong via NFBCS
Sent: Friday, September 2, 2022 3:09 PM
To: 'NFB in Computer Science Mailing List' <nfbcs at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Curtis Chong <chong.curtis at gmail.com>
Subject: [NFBCS] The Fine Line Between Reasonable Versus Unreasonable
Accommodations
Greetings everyone:
I would like to second what Brian Buhrow said in his recent email.
"If one is going to hold a job as a blind person, whether it be in
technology or something else, it is necessary to become an expert on how to
make things accessible for yourself."
While some of you might assert that we cannot all be experts in making
things accessible to ourselves, the reality is that as individual blind
people working in an organization where we might be the only blind person
employed, we must take responsibility for hunting down the solutions we need
so that we can do our jobs in a way that encourages our employers to want to
keep us. It is a rare thing indeed for technology training classes (not to
mention other corporate training venues) to be nonvisually-accessible to us
by default. In fact, I maintain that if we insist that these classes need to
be 100% accessible nonvisually in order for us to keep our jobs, our value
to the employer will be reduced to the point where we are no longer useful
to have around. When email first became a reality in the large corporation
for which I was working (this would have been back in the early 1990's), I
took the same courses on how to use the email system that my sighted
colleagues took. Then, when I needed to figure out how a mouse click could
be activated from the keyboard, I spent extra time with the trainer to try
to figure out if, indeed, there were keyboard equivalents to the mouse that
would work for me. During my time in mainstream information technology, I
was oftentimes required to travel to distant cities to attend week-long
trainings where the material was presented for people who could see and
where readers were nowhere to be found. Sometimes, I attended these classes
with sighted colleagues who were willing and able to provide some
assistance. At other times, I attended these classes by myself and figured
out what I needed to know later when I got back to my office.
All of this is to make the point that there is a limit to how much we as
blind employees can expect to receive in the way of "reasonable"
accommodations. When the level of accommodation provided to us reaches a
certain point (a point, by the way, which differs from one organization to
another), the positive support we have garnered tends to wane as the effort
required to provide that support increases.
I hope I am making some kind of logical sense here. If not, I appreciate
hearing from folks to help to clarify my thinking on this issue.
Best wishes,
Curtis Chong
-----Original Message-----
From: NFBCS <nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Brian Buhrow via NFBCS
Sent: Friday, September 02, 2022 1:32 PM
To: NFB in Computer Science Mailing List <nfbcs at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Brian Buhrow <buhrow at nfbcal.org>
Subject: Re: [NFBCS] Feedback Request
hello peter. As a long time IT person who has worked on networks,
large computer
installations, and a variety of technical projects, I am going to echo wha
others have said
here about on-line resources. It is usually the case that when one is
learning a new API or
programming technique, or any new skill for that matter, what one needs to
know about is the
skill itself, not about the blindness adaptations necessary to become an
expert at that skill.
Because everyone's blindness skills are different, it makes the most sense
for the individual
learning the new thing to figure out the way that works best for them.
So, for example, Bookshare. Yes, the books in Bookshare may not discuss
ways to peform the
skills those books teach as they might be performed by a blind person, but
the fact that the
books are accessible on Bookshare makes them extremely useful to blind folks
just by virtue of
the fact that they're there.
Now, having read those books, one can then ask specific questions about how
a specific API or
development environment might be used in an accessible manner.
If one is going to hold a job as a blind person, whether it be in
technology or something
else, it is necessary to become an expert on how to make things accessible
for yourself. As
part of that, building a network, as exists on this list, becomes one of the
tools you use to
gain the knowledge you need to do the things you want.
Blindness specific training is wonderful, but it is mostly a general
training in the sense that it
teaches you how to teach yourself to use tools or create techniques which
make things
accessible to you. Those tools and techniques might not work for anyone
else in the world, but
if they work for you, then you're good. For example, for me, half the
battle of learning to do
something is just knowing another blind person has done that thing. If I
know they have, then
I can turn the question of "can I do something?" to "How do I do something?"
Once I've have
how, then I can go about setting up the task of figuring it out.
Part of the reason we've not set up an NFB CS web site is that it
would be out of date
before we finished building it. If we said, for example, that something was
inaccessible,
someone would prove us wrong. Or, if we said, if you follow these
instructions for making
something work, the thing would change and our instructions would be
rendered inoperative.
In other words, what we offer you here, and in our training centers, are a
lot of fishing
poles. We leave it to you, the fisherman to go out and catch your fish.
-Brian
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