[nfbcs] The Future of Technology: A Journey

[Kevin]

A big part of the equation is how you carry yourself really. Holding 
your head up high and showing backbone will get you respect from most.  
Not all, but most.



On 8/16/2018 7:21 PM, Vincent Martin via nfbcs wrote:
> 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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>
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