[nfbcs] The Future of Technology: A Journey

[vincentfmartin2020 at gmail.com]

This has been an interesting discussion about a very old topic that affects
people not only with just with visual disabilities and also has many other
facets and variables associated with it.  In the past, I have worked as a
Assistive Technology instructor, Rehabilitation Engineer, Research
Scientist, and accessibility and usability consultant.  Since I am formerly
sighted and the vast majority of my friends and work colleagues have been
and currently are sighted, I have seen and garner information and opinions
from many viewpoints.  
The first viewpoint that affects people with disabilities and especially
visual disabilities deals with an  implicit bias that is extremely difficult
to get people to remotely understand or admit that they have and even harder
to get past.  Blindness is by far the most terrifying of disabilities that
the general populace does not want to endure and consequently, they also
don't want to interact with it.  As a professional rehabilitator I saw many
hundreds of people who experienced a visual loss that never adjusted to it
and did not want to even remotely attempt to go back to work.  Many did not
even think that they were able to do so with their disability and in most
cases they were absolutely correct.  Plain and simply stated, Being blind is
very hard to do!
Before I left the rehabilitation arena, I kept statistics on many of my
students and what became of them.  Of the students that were taught that had
Diabetic Retinopathy, I never saw one out of the thirty-three that completed
the courses that went back to work in any capacity.  I only had three with
Glaucoma that ever became employed again.  I had the most success with ones
with my own disease of Retinitis Pigmentosa but the success rate was around
ten percent.  I have not delved deeply into why this may have the case by
reading research literature, but I do have my suspicions why this may be a
higher rate that I encountered.  I also can't generalize or infer that
similar results occur in other places.
Since most people in the United states actually endure some form of trauma
that causes their visual loss, people born with their visual disabilities
actually deal with approaching the arena of work with a disability.  By far
the most fun and success I had was working with students in summer camps,
summer technology camps, or after-school assistance and mentoring programs.
If you can find a caring parent that wants success for their child and is
willing to learn as much as possible and fight for them, then you can even
overcome the pitfalls of a poorly run school system and help the child
aspire toward and attain life and work success.  This is not a panacea, but
in my experiences, it has been the most successful strategy that leads to
employment in life.
Unfortunately, the employment data paints quite a bleak picture if you have
a disability and especially a visual disability.  In order for an adult that
has even had a lot of support, education, and mentoring, the roadblocks put
forth by those biases is an extreme mitigating factor.  
The case that I would like to put forth is a prime example of a person with
a very strong skillset who experienced a visual loss and then has tried to
navigate the world of employment since.  It is only one of many where the
client had a phenomenal skillset, but is very indicative of what occurs when
you develop a disability during your career.
I met this woman when she came into the research center I was teaching in
back in 2001.  She was a newlywed and had been a Magna Cum Laude graduate in
electrical Engineering and was a systems tester and analyst for a company in
the Southeast.  The health affliction that caused her visual disability also
almost killed her.  She ended up needing brain surgery and having a shunt
put into her brain.  When I first saw her for evaluation, she had only been
out of her wheelchair for two weeks.  Knowing that she was the ultimate
anomaly that I had come into this facility, I immediately approached her
training differently.  The first thing was to show her (she was depressed
since she had never heard of a blind engineer) that there were some in
existence.  I told her to touch my two Paralympic rings within the first
hour of evaluation and told her to say hello to a person that had two
engineering degrees as well.  She told me years later that this interaction
is what made here think she might be able to get her life back on track.
Since she did have a very small amount of usable vision, she was able to use
it to assist in learning Orientation and Mobility quickly and efficiently.
She even had doubts as to why she did not think it was as hard as some other
with much more vision thought it was.  I finally told her that it was just
them teaching her to drive a stick and not a formal lab in an upper level
engineering class.  Two days later, she was off to the malls with the O and
M instructor.  When the State rehabilitation technology manager and his team
went to worksite to determine if it could be modified, they told her that
they were sorry and it could not be done.  It took the conference call with
me that night and a blind tech support representative from Freedom
Scientific to inform her that there were at least four others in the country
using the same system effectively for her to truly rely on the other blind
people to get her back to work.  Two years later, when her company imploded,
she took the by-out and eventually found another job.  It was in late 2006,
when I was working as a research scientist for the Veteran's Administration
did we "steal" her to come work for us.  My former supervisor had hired more
blind people than any sighted person I had ever seen and he normally favored
them over sighted employees.  He could use the Schedule "A" hiring authority
to hire them without competition, but he always tried to find multiple
qualified people with disabilities to interview.  It was in 2009 when she
was finally able to safely  get pregnant and she headed home to be a
full-time mother for five years.  
That lasted for three years, until her daughter headed to pre-school and she
was bored out of her mind.  She was accepted into Drexel's hybrid in-class
and on-line M.B.A. program and completed her degree in two years.  
Her final research project dealt with a business marketing study of
including accessibility into products at the beginning and how much that
increases overall value and sales to a product.  She actually presented it
at conferences and was published in an academic journal.  Her second study,
completed two years ago, was also published and presented.  In the four
years since she completed her degree, she has been unable to find a
full-time position that is comparable to her education and skillset.  She
started her own consulting company in-order to have actual 1099 forms that
show that she actually had done consulting work.  This is because two years
ago, she was offered a six-figure salaried position at a Fortune 50 company
to manage some accessibility projects for the company, but was eventually
disqualified because they could not "confirm" all her work.  It was actually
cheaper for her to charge less money for some jobs and take direct pay for
some work.  All of her work was then routed through her consulting company,
since most companies could not comprehend how a person that is getting
disability benefits juggles part-time work in order to keep the income
coming.  She then started to work for a major accessibility related company
part-time to insure that she had continuous work periods as she still looked
for the right full-time position.  After that full year,  she resigned and
is now looking for a full-time position on her own.  Over the past three
years, she had had many initial interviews with many major tech companies
only to be denied a call back for a second or site visit interview.  What
seems to be hindering her ability to move into this upper echelon of
employment in the tech field?  Is it her visual impairment, her gender or
some combination of the two?  
I have actually sat in the room when she had a few Skype interviews and
watched the hostility flow from some of the various interviewers.  One
female recruiter insured her that one of the interviews she was sitting for
with a major financial institution was looking for more of her understanding
of technical systems and business procedures than specific accessibility
knowledge in the web arena.  Two of the male interviewers lit into her about
not knowing certain ARIA roles off the top of her head and held it against
her at the end of the interview.  Later, she told the recruiter that she
felt like she got ambushed during the process.  I do know that she has been
told by the head of a major accessibility company that there was a concern
that the developers would not work well with her since most of them were
male and she would be managing their progress.  Last week, she was told
during an interview at a Fortune 100 company here in Atlanta that they had
concerns about her ability to do color contrast in accessibility testing and
were more concerned about her ability to get to the job.  This is a job
where the contract work paid $55 per hour.  They were concerned with a
visually impaired person's ability to get to work when they did not put
transportation down as a requirement of the job.  She has an actual EEOC
claim here, but is not remotely interested in them anymore for any reason.
As I know, after a while you get tired of fighting and move on to the next
opportunity.  The recruitor for that position disappeared after she let the
same company know that I was interested, but I soon found out that the
company hired two employees that were sighted.  
Now there is another factor that I have not divulged until now as it is also
important and quite relevant.  I never stated that she is African American
as well.  In the Tech world, African American women are represented the
least and are compensated the least of all ethnic groups in America.  You
also rarely see a person of African American ethnicity at a conference
related to rehabilitation, accessibility, or assistive technology as well
either.  She stands out so much at the CSUN, RESNA, or M-Enabling
conferences that a double take is sometimes warranted.  Is there an
additional implicit bias in play here?  She is probably the most competent
and qualified of all students that I evaluated or trained over a
thirteen-year career and I have seen many other students that were nowhere
in her range become employed and thrive.  
What may be to her benefit is what I have been stressing to her during the
is long and painful process though.  She interviewed for a major tech
company last week and then had a second interview on Friday.  She left on
Wednesday afternoon for her trip to this major Silicon Valley company for
her site visit.  In this case, I am much more optimistic than her other
recent misses.  She is being considered for the position of Business manager
of an accessibility department this time.  Most of all, the people that have
done the initial interviews have disabilities ranging from blindness to
paraplegia.  The final person she will interview with, the actual hiring
manager,  is sighted, but has a long career in this field.  This person
actually sat in all of her presentations at the CSUN conference  over the
past four years and was elated when he found out that she had applied for
the position.  This is the second time she is approaching the hiring stage
with a major company in a position of real importance and authority and it
is probably because she encountered people that knew what her actual
skillset was and respected it.  They also did not hold her disability
against her, as they knew the strength it takes to succeed with any major
impairment.   
If this is what it takes for people with severe visual impairments to claw
their way into jobs that are commiserate with their abilities, I see how
many people give up or don't put forth an effort.  This is only a part of
the equation as I have seen what occurs with Unfortunately over the past
fifteen years I have served as an expert witness in seventeen discrimination
cases for people with visual impairments.  All of the cases have been
settled either in mediation or out of court.  Some of the things done to
these employees at work would boggle your mind.  There is nothing that a
person can tell me that occurred at work concerning either disability, age,
race, gender or other forms of discrimination.  I know that telling them to
have a positive attitude did not solve the problem.  I had one client suffer
a stress-induced stroke at work at the age of twenty-eight related to her
Lupus simply because her supervisor would not allow her to use a flexible
schedule.  This was a simple, disability related accommodation that is
easily remedied at the federal level but she was fighting for it over a year
when the stroke occurred.  A Federal law even requires departments to
consider letting every employee even work from home once a week if it is
possible.  When your manager does not understand their job, nor your
disability, your job and your life can be in danger.  I know this occurs and
can deter many people as I see them leave their jobs all the time, rather
than fight it out.  I have seen careers destroyed, marriages strained, and
homes lost simply because of the implicit bias that these people endure
because of their disability.
I also have encountered it, but still choose to proudly let any recruiter
know ahead of time that I am blind.  It is on my linked-in profile and is
prominent on my resume.  I am actually proud to know that I am the first
legally blind and then first totally blind graduate of a technological
university and then became the first and only totally blind graduate in the
132 year history of Georgia Tech and I accomplished it for the second time
in May of this year.  I now have two post graduate technological degrees in
Human Computer Interaction and Computer Science to go with my undergraduate
degree in engineering Psychology and two engineering degrees.
Since I am looking for senior level positions now, and I readily project my
disability in front of me, I expect to garner a vast amount of resistance
and rejection as I search for the right position.  During my search the past
five months, I have been in the final running for three major positions, but
have come up short.  Of the three, the only process that was close to being
accessible was a position with one of the Federal agencies.  I actually
thought the agency made the right decision when I found out who was hired.
The person, who I know personally, had a longer career in the same area that
I am now in and has had increasing responsibilities the past fifteen years.

Do I know having Doctor next to my name can help, yes.  Do I know that my
disability works against me?  Of course!  Most recruiters don't look at my
linked-in profile close enough to actually see the part about being totally
blind.  When I either talk to them over the phone or when they see it on my
resume is when I feel the level of frigidity increase.  This has occurred
six times during the past three months.  I have four recruiters who will not
respond to any e-mail message from me now.  
Thankfully, I have a lucrative way of keeping my income respectable, while I
search for the right position.  I can do contract accessibility work from
home part-time and embarked on a project I have been talking about for
twenty years.  I started the research, outline, and actual writing of what I
call "The Accommodations Handbook" in early May.  I am hoping to be just the
editor of the book, as I have some requests out for authorship of different
chapters concerning different disabilities and differing technologies.
Right now, it is estimated to come in over two thousand pages as it should
cover almost all disabilities and the most common problems and situations
related to accommodations at work or at school.  Over my many years in this
arena, almost thirty now, I have encountered very few people that have an
extensive knowledge that are in actual charge of making systems or processes
accessible.  They have the authority, but don't live up to the
responsibility of the position.  In most cases, they are basically
approaching the position from the compliance instead of the inclusion route.
With that position and with the proliferation of technology over the past
twenty-five years, it is almost impossible for them to be competent in their
positions.
My favorite example of this syndrome is personified in a webinar that the
Federal government produced for its employees.  It is called, "So you've
been selected as the Disability Program manager, What do you do now"  
Most of these positions in departments and agencies in the Federal
government are anywhere between a GS-12 and GS-14.  They actually hire
people with very little knowledge to do these jobs and they usually know
they don't have the full background to do them.  I have seen people with
actual disabilities with actual degrees related to many aspects of
disability and years of experience be summarily dismissed from consideration
because they have a severe disability.
In rehabilitation related Master's degrees there are two classes that are
required for students in the discipline.  The names may not be the same in
all arenas, but they are  basically "the Medical Aspects of Disability" and
"The Psychosocial Aspects of Disability".  From my many years of working in
this arena, they are by far the most important things that a person making
decisions about disability related topics  should understand.  I soon
realized this in the early 1990's when I started privately instructing
clients to use personal computers.  Although I was technically trained, I
was able to effectively communicate technical issues into a Muchmore simple
format for non-technically trained individuals.  In working with people with
severe disabilities, I soon realized that their abilities to understand were
much more on a diverging scale than I was accustomed to at an engineering
school.  The more I worked in this arena, including working as a
rehabilitation engineer, truly required me to spend much more time reading
and researching the specifics to disability rather than the technology.
Understanding and teaching it was simple, but being prepared for the nuances
associated with my student population really required work.  
When I became the first blind engineer to work for the State of Alabama in
1995 and really worked with multiple disabilities is when I felt that I
needed to learn as much about as many disabilities as I could possibly learn
and add the discipline of Human Factors to my tool box.  If this is what a
blind person that wanted to do their best in evaluation, accommodation,
modification and teaching did over twenty years ago, can you imagine how he
feels about a person with an undergraduate degree in Business administration
who has worked as a clerical worker for the federal government being
selected to be a reasonable accommodations coordinator or disability program
manager for a full agency?  I literally had a disability program manager
deny the request for a twenty-four inch monitor for his legally blind
reasonable accommodations coordinator by having another person in the office
say that there was no difference in the viewing area between that and a
seventeen inch monitor.  Simply because the department did not want to spend
just a little bit of money for the monitor. My colleague had to almost fight
a war just to get a large enough monitor and the right assistive technology
to make the machine accessible.  If she did not know about the Computer
Accommodations Program (CAP) through the Department of Defense, she may have
had even more difficulty than she went through.  

I was in the D.C. area two months ago interviewing for a senior assistive
technology engineer position with a major defense contractor.  After the
day-long interview, I still had to give a twenty-minute job talk
(presentation) on any topic I chose.  Instead of website accessibility,
research methods, or user profiles, I chose to explain why I even considered
interviewing for the position.  I explained that I came because of my former
lab mate from graduate school who had recently started working there.  He
knew absolutely nothing about disabilities and assistive technology  when he
started in 2011.  Later, after doing much research in the field,  he decided
to spend the rest of his career working in this arena.  He is one of those
sighted people that actually was interested and learned as much as he
possibly could about visual impairments and how they affect the
understanding and use of software and electronic devices.  As a former
undergraduate engineering major and the son and grandson of professional
engineers with Ph.D. degrees, Engineering psychology was much better fit for
him.  When he asked me if I was interested in coming to work with his
company, I said I would come and work with him!  That is because I knew that
he understood what the issues were.  A week after the interview, when I did
not get an offer, neither he nor I was surprised.  This company had
interviewed five different people for the same position over the past four
months and still had not found the fit they were looking for.  Since I had
also told them that I was also interviewing them to see if we were a match,
I respected their decision and kept on writing.  Three days later, another
department asked if they could look at my resume and vitae to see if my
skillset fit any of their openings.  
This is the process that many people in the tech field are now used to going
through.  The multiple initial interviews that are followed up by the site
visit with a full day of interviews to see if you match the team that has
been assembled to interview or to work with you in the future.  If you have
to endure this process and there people within it that have unseen implicit
biases, then that is another variable that can hinder your ability to find
meaningful and rewarding work as a person that has a severe visual
disability.  
And that finally gets me back to where this all begins.  What if you are a
person who is visually impaired and only have skills that are just good
enough for qualifying the job seeker for basic to a little above marginal
work.  About seventy-five percent of all jobs that have been lost since the
great recession of 2008 were caused by automation and not by outsourcing.
Those types of jobs will never return and any employees that lost out have
to find another profession.  Given how the data is concerning adult
learning, you can say goodbye to many of them.  That is why so many people
have opted for early retirement or claimed Social Security Disability
benefits.  There are some cities and towns in the mid-west where up to
thirty percent of the past workforce has done this.  Opioid abuse is also
rampant in these areas.  Add in any implicit biases and it is very easy to
see how the rate of employment is so dismal.  
A major part of Industrial and Systems Engineering is measuring what a job
entails to be completed.  This includes the skills necessary to do so and
how quickly a qualified a person should be able to complete.  Since the
Americans with Disabilities Act is the only civil rights law with a "but"
clause in it, the least amount of value added to a product or outcome for a
job that pays minimally makes it cost prohibitive to consider modifications
for this potential employee.  Here in Georgia, there are many jobs where up
to forty percent of the people they want to hire can't pass the basic drug
test.  Some companies are considering not even testing for drugs such as
marijuana now, just to get positions filled.  I have championed trying to
hire people with disabilities in some of these positions, but getting
employers to bite is extremely difficult.     
I have had the honor of serving on the advisory board of the Georgia
Vocational Rehabilitation Agency for the past three years.  I am in the
beginning of my last and final term, but enjoy having a voice in how the
newly formed agency is run.  Having come from under the umbrella of the
Labor department, which used the federal drawdown dollars from the
rehabilitation services agency to help fund the regular state labor
department, we have gotten much more done in the state since 2012.  Most
importantly, we have been able to get agreements from several employers all
over the state that have literally set aside jobs for people with
disabilities if they have the minimum job qualifications, have good personal
references and get past the interviewing process.  There was one of the job
fairs with a major employer on Tuesday and no person that did not have a
disability was present.  Everyone that interviewed well will go into the
general interview for many positions next week.  We know, from past
experience, that the employers that pre-screen this way have been extremely
happy with their employees with all types of disabilities.  The last data I
saw about their job retention was much better than people without
disabilities and that was for every disability group that was represented
among the hires.
What I have outlined here is not intended to be all inclusive or make me
into a sage like job whisperer.  It is just to add a lot more context to the
debate that has been going on so far.
   


-----Original Message-----
From: nfbcs <nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Peter Donahue via nfbcs
Sent: Saturday, August 11, 2018 9:53 PM
To: 'NFB in Computer Science Mailing List' <nfbcs at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Peter Donahue <pdonahue2 at satx.rr.com>
Subject: Re: [nfbcs] The Future of Technology: A Journey

Good evening everyone,

	There is still a need to convince blind people to get out and work
especially when opportunities are placed in their lap and they turn them
down. Mary and I have seen this up close and personal. Yes it's necessary to
educate employers to hire blind applicants but it's also the responsibility
of blind individuals to seaze opportunities known to be legal, sound, and
have a proven track record of success when presented with them. Why go to
work for someone else when an opportunity to own your own business is given
to you . As that business grows you'll eventually need employees to help run
the office. Guess what. Now you're in a position to offer job opportunities
to qualified blind persons in addition to sighted employees. Combatting
employment discrimination among the blind is a 2-way street.

Peter Donahue



-----Original Message-----
From: nfbcs [mailto:nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Andy Borka via
nfbcs
Sent: Saturday, August 11, 2018 4:43 PM
To: 'NFB in Computer Science Mailing List'
Cc: Andy Borka
Subject: Re: [nfbcs] The Future of Technology: A Journey

We don't need to convince blind people to get out and work. We need to
convince employers to hire qualified blind people to do the work. More
people are denied work because of disability, age, and other protected
classes set out by the ADA and EEOC. With a blog to convince blind people to
get out and contribute, more employers might think we are lazy and can't do
much. Besides, performing research doesn't pay the bills.



-----Original Message-----
From: nfbcs <nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Kevin via nfbcs
Sent: Saturday, August 11, 2018 1:55 PM
To: 'NFB in Computer Science Mailing List' <nfbcs at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Kevin <kevinsisco61784 at gmail.com>
Subject: [nfbcs] The Future of Technology: A Journey

I post this in the hopes that it inspires blind computer scientists to help
the field as a whole advance.  Let's Encourage blind researchers to get out
there!  I have created a blog of essays, algorithms, and anything related to
computer science.  The goal is to show the world that blind people can have
a voice in computer science.  The link is:

http://tfotaj.blogspot.com

Enjoy!  P.S. contributors are welcome.



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