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Screen readers and Braille displays make it much easier for blind people to access the Internet and most written material. Although the problem of visually-oriented Web pages still persists, blind and visually-impaired techies today can perform most functions demanded by engineering and IT jobs.
Virginia Stern, director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) project on Science, Technology and Disability, notes that, "As long as the employee does the research and explains the need to the employer, employers will usually provide the technology, whether it's a Braille display or a screen reader."
One of the biggest employment hurdles for blind workers, Stern feels, is another form of technology: transportation. "It limits the choice of jobs. It's a major problem if you have a job and the company moves.
"Mobility between different job sites may have an impact as well. Telecommuting is helping somewhat, but has not eliminated the problem."
It's more than having a job, Stern says. "These problems can impede advancement." Several of the blind techies we spoke to have wrestled with transportation issues and solved them in their own ways.
Sighted Electronics provides Braille technology
David Pillischer is not blind himself, but he has long been interested in helping blind people. "I grew up in the New York area, and my mother was involved with the Bronx Lions Club. The club helps people from all over who have vision problems," he explains. "We used to have blind people staying at our house and I would drive them to and from Montefiore Hospital."
One day a student sponsored by the Lions needed help with an electronic video magnifier for people with low vision, and Pillischer was introduced to the new technology of assistive devices for people with visual impairments.
In 1982 he founded Sighted Electronics (Westwood, NJ), which provides computer access technology for the blind and visually impaired.
Eighty percent of Sighted Electronics' clients are colleges, schools and government agencies, and many of the users are programmers or attorneys, Pillischer notes. The equipment he provides includes re-freshable Braille displays, Braille note-takers and Braille embossers that display text in Grade 1 or Grade 2 Braille.
The Braille note-taker is a Linux-based product which works like a PDA and has both Ethernet and USB ports. "You can add a QWERTY or Braille keyboard and type into it," he says.
The Linux operating system works with Windows, DOS and Unix. "A lot of European governments are going to the Linux OS," Pillischer says. "It's a very stable and open system and doesn't use as much memory. A lot of programmers love it."
A new WinBraille program works with most Windows apps and can import graphic files and photos. It can also produce raised graphics, used for math, maps and drawings.
"We're still working to perfect the mathematics translation, but having Braille and graphics on the same page is a big accomplishment," Pillischer notes.
Thomas Edward Craig works in tech support
Thomas Edward Craig is a tech support and sales rep for Sighted Electronics, working from his Austin, TX home. Born blind, Craig uses a cane rather than a guide dog because he often travels by plane. He frequently uses public transportation and when he bought his new house, he made sure it was on not one but three bus routes.
He's able to do much of his tech support work from home, however. "I teach customers to use the technology, offer tech support and diagnose problems over the phone. I also do a lot of beta testing before the end user gets to see the product."
Although he took CS courses at the University of Texas-Austin, Craig says most of what he does on the job is self-taught. That's because "The computer field has changed so much over the years," he explains.
Craig has been with Sighted Electronics for eight years now. Before that he worked for the Texas School for the Blind. In 1989 he began moonlighting as a sales rep for assistive technology, then moved into full-time work.
"I started it mainly to get employee discounts on the equipment," he says with a smile. "Then I realized I could make it a career."
Eventually he began to work for a distributor of the Braillex, a refreshable Braille display that has 80 horizontal and 22 vertical characters, about what a sighted techie sees on a computer screen. Craig was so taken with Braillex that when Sighted Electronics picked it up, he followed the technology to the new company.
Installing the assistive equipment and training people to use it are complex tasks. Craig is usually working with one or a few blind folks in a room or office full of sighted people.
"Every office I walk into has a slightly different computer network and application, different versions, different interfaces," he explains. "We have to make adjustments to the software and also in the way we teach the customer to operate it. We have to look at the application and give people the most efficient techniques."
One of the perks of Craig's job is the interesting people he gets to meet. "There are blind physicists, electrical engineers, even artists. One of my customers was the blind jazz pianist Ray Charles. He was learning to use e-mail at the age of seventy-two. We joked a lot."
David Mielke is a programmer with Nortel
A computer programmer with Nortel Networks (Brampton, ON, Canada), David Mielke has been totally blind since the age of two as the result of familial exudative vitreoretinopathy (FEVR). He works out of his Ottawa home most of the time, and goes into the office only to attend meetings or special events.
Mielke works in configuration management systems, maintaining the source code. "I work in areas that interface between the higher-level code and the underlying operating systems," he explains. "I do low-level code myself, and I also monitor and direct the higher-level applications. Underneath it all the platforms are very different."
He uses a Braillex 2D with an eighty-cell display so he can have a good idea of what's on the screen.
Mielke says he loves coding. "I also like to teach others how to do it. While my official job involves working on projects and features users want, my unofficial job includes teaching."
At school back in the mainframe days, Mielke switched out of EE "because computers were cooler." Assistive technology was limited back then, so he had to find people to read the books to him. By treating the reading as a study session he got plenty of volunteers.
"Reading forced them to slow down and pay attention so they learned more. We talked it out and learned together," he explains. He received a BSCS from the University of British Columbia-Vancouver in 1978.
His first job was with Bell Northern Research (now Nortel Networks, Ottawa, ON, Canada), working with an internally developed compiler for a commercial switchboard. In 1980 he moved to a department where they were working on the DMS100, the first computerized telephone switch. "I looked after the loader and the initial image generator," he says. "I came up with such a nice, fast version that I'm still looking after it today."
In 1982 Mielke moved into the internal configuration management system, and he's still there. "It's migrated from an IBM mainframe environment to Unix workstations, then PCs. From a single database it's grown to a hundred that run globally on different platforms in real time. It's become a massive network."
In his work, "You have to be intelligent about where you look for problems in debugging code," Mielke says. "I usually just get the ones they can't figure out. If there's a big time crunch I'll do it, but a lot of times I just give the other programmers advice."
Being blind can offer an advantage in some ways, Mielke says. "I think in three dimensions because I'm not limited by vision or blinded by optical illusions."
Besides, being blind lets him telecommute. And that means he can schedule his working hours around the activities of his thirteen children.
Larry Honaker of the DOD: job scheduling in an SAP database
Larry Honaker lost his sight as a child when he fell on a broken bottle. Today he's a computer specialist with the Defense Systems Integration Office (DSIO) in Columbus, OH. DSIO is part of the Defense Logistics Agency (Ft Belvoir, VA), which is a unit of the Department of Defense (DOD, Washington, DC).
Until recently his assignment was to update an old Cobol-based program for automated materials management to a newer ERP program. He was converting software originally written in the 1960s.
Now, a new position has Honaker working on job scheduling in an SAP database environment. "We have to enter the job, define all the parameters, then build it into the job scheduler. It's been going on for two years and we're still building in new jobs and testing them."
His typical day is pretty hectic as the group prepares for a big release. "As part of the Control-M team I review the logs for jobs that ran the previous day. If any jobs failed I send them back to the department that handles them. The rest of my day is spent testing new jobs and making changes or corrections to them."
Honaker has a certificate in business programming from Southern College (Orlando, FL) and spent several years at Wright State University (Dayton, OH) and Columbus State University (Columbus, OH), but he never graduated. Instead, he and his wife joined a food service operation set up by the government to be run by the blind.
While running a cafeteria across from a DOD computer center, Honaker got to know some people there. "They found out I had a background in computers and suggested I come to work with them."
He was hired as a computer programmer with the DOD Defense Electronics Supply Center (Dayton, OH). In 1989 he moved to DSIO to do software design.
In his work he uses the Elba, a portable Braille note-taker, and Jaws, made by Freedom Scientific (St. Petersburg, FL), which works with his screen reader to turn written text into speech. Both the DOD and DLA have been very good in providing him with equipment, including a Braille display on his desktop, though the Elba is his own. He notes that the DLA has several blind employees and a program dedicated to employees with disabilities.
One of Honaker's greatest challenges is the Windows environment. "We were coming along pretty well with DOS and its command line. Windows really made it tough for speech and Braille access.
"Every time there's a new iteration there are new problems," he says. "The access just isn't as great as it was with DOS. It's getting better, but we're not there yet."
Renee Squier: cool technology for the State of Oregon
Since 1997, Renee Squier has been working for the State of Oregon in the Department of Human Services (Salem, OR). She's a computer programmer, using Cobol, Easy Plus, JCL and DB2 for legacy systems running on IBM mainframes.
"We work on food stamps and electronic benefit transfer," she says. "I do maintenance on existing programs and some development." She goes to meetings and interacts with internal customers to see what they need.
Squier has a 1990 associates degree in CS plus others in sociology and philosophy. She was working toward a BSCS at California State Polytechnic University, but moved to Oregon to take part in a corporate internship program for programmers with disabilities.
The internship didn't work out, but she found a job with Oregon State working on its Y2K project.
Squier started out to be a medical transcriber, but her training expired during maternity leave. When she was ready to go back to work she began to take the required computer courses and got interested in programming.
"Then I was introduced to assistive technology and talking computer screen readers. It's been an exciting challenge and I can do it."
Squier went blind when she was eight after surgery for a brain tumor. She has light perception, but reads Braille and uses the 102 character Braillex display. "I love it. It's really cool. Without the display I don't have the same level of confidence in the accuracy of the information I need to do my job."
She uses city buses to get to work, occasionally calling on her daughter to drive her. "I couldn't live where I didn't have public transportation," she says. Her commute averages forty minutes.
The increasingly graphic environment of the Internet gives her some problems, but in general Squier can cope with them. "There's always a page you can't access," she says with exasperation. "I can't always tell when things are pop-ups. But Braillex gives me more control over that."
Squier has joined a local technology group for the blind and visually-impaired. "When a new technology comes out, I get a member to come into the office and talk to us about it," she says.
William Kappler does tech writing at NAVAIR
The Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR, Patuxent River, MD) provides tech support to the Navy and Marine Corps. William Kappler started at NAVAIR's Lakehurst, NJ site as an intern while attending Rutgers College of Engineering (New Brunswick, NJ). When he received his BSME in 1969 he went to work full time, and has been there ever since.
"I work in test," he explains, "mostly doing technical report writing concerning evaluations of equipment being tested. Our mission is to test flight-deck equipment using the two catapults we have here. The group also works with jet-blast deflectors and I do some work on the helicopter landing platforms they use on smaller ships."
Kappler started his career as a sighted techie, but gradually became blind as a result of diabetic retinopathy. In 1978 he took two years off to learn Braille and get fitted with a guide dog; then he returned to work.
It's too dangerous for a visually impaired person to work in the field around the giant hydraulic- and steam-powered catapults, but Kappler's former field experience is valuable to him in his technical work.
Kappler carpools to work, and because he has to travel to different buildings he brings his guide dog with him. He uses Jaws, a speech-synthesizing screen reader, on his computers at work and at home "which allows me to use the Internet almost as well as anyone else," he says.
"Most of the stuff that comes across my desk is in electronic format, and I can read most of the newspapers on the Internet." After all, he notes, "When I came back to work in 1980 we didn't even have computers."
The computer, he says, "made the entire difference in my ability to do my job. Before we had computers I recorded on tape, then in Braille, then typed it. I was never sure if it was correct. Now I can keep thousands of files and bring up what I need in minutes."
At home, Kappler's hobbies are gardening and fishing. "We live in a waterfront community, and I take full advantage of that," he says.
Michael R. Burks: Internet accessibility at AT&T Worldnet
Michael R. Burks was born with cataracts in both eyes. An early operation left him blind in one eye and with a cataract in the other. When he was fourteen the remaining cataract was removed and he was able to see for the first time.
Today Burks is a senior member of the tech staff at AT&T Corp (Bedminster, NJ). He is a product manager for AT&T Worldnet Services, works with the Internet abuse team, and is an authority on accessible websites and co-author of a book on how to build them.
"I enjoy being a customer advocate," he says. "I love working with customers because they're our window into problems."
He's on call twenty-four hours a day. He works with the Worldnet site to keep it accessible, and with other techies who run tests on the AT&T network.
"Accessibility is an ongoing project," he explains. "We meet to discuss network strategy and work on customer messages, problems and issues that pop up."
Burks also interacts with Individuals with Disabilities: Enabling Advocacy Link (IDEAL), an AT&T business resource group. And he goes to conferences for the company. But he most often works out of his home in North Carolina, putting in ten or twelve hours a day.
His 1969 BA in anthropology from the University of New Mexico was not the usual start to an IT career. "It was difficult to get a good job back then. I worked at several things, and finally got into IT in 1979 as a spool filing clerk in New York City."
Then he found a programming job with the State of New York. In 1984 he and AT&T got together when he landed a job in ops support at a company data center in Bridgewater, NJ. He worked on mainframes, supporting the nightly runs.
In 1986 Burks moved to financial giant Goldman Sachs (New York, NY) as a systems programmer. But he came back to AT&T two years later to work on a commercial e-mail system.
"My job was to help interface with other e-mail systems. We were in the process of hooking up to Internet-type e-mail. We ended up working with data interchange."
In 1994 he moved to North Carolina to help launch one of the first PDA-type devices. And he finally met up with the Worldnet project.
"I was there from the beginning," Burks explains. "I helped write some of the original documentation at Worldnet. I also worked on the network from the customer side." About five years ago he went into product management.
Burks can drive, but he does not have depth perception and gets tired easily when reading. He uses a screen reader to find out if a site is accessible and working well, and he magnifies text to make it easier to read.
"Having been blind for so long when I was young, I sometimes have problems organizing what I'm seeing," he explains. "I've never had a lens implant, because with only one eye I don't want to risk it."
Burks is slightly deaf, and also has an arrested case of muscular dystrophy which occasionally requires the use of a cane. If he gets tired typing, he switches to voice-recognition technology.
Clifford Spjut works on flight safety at Boeing
Clifford Spjut is an advanced material technology analyst for the Boeing Co (Chicago, IL). He works at the company's Everett, WA site as part of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, where his material and process technology group tests materials used in the interior of the planes for flammability.
"My work is in validation," Spjut says. "I go through and review code and make sure it matches standards." He employs an engineering standards distribution system tool to make sure designers are using current parts, methods and processes.
He's been in flammability work since 1987, "when the FAA came out with new rules about heat release," he says. He was involved in FAA flammability certification for the 747 and 767, helping designers select interior materials to meet FAA and Boeing requirements for self-extinguishing materials.
Some eleven years ago he realized he was having a vision problem. "Growths in the optic nerve were cutting off the blood supply," he explains. "I was down to fifteen degrees of visual field. It has continued and now I'm down to about two degrees. When I walk I see virtually nothing."
Tuffy, his guide dog, sees just fine. He's from Guide Dogs for the Blind (San Rafael, CA) and comes to work with Spjut every day. "Guide dogs are the most wonderful thing in the world," Spjut says. "I can walk anywhere with my dog. He even guides me around low-hanging tree branches."
Spjut received an associates degree in chemistry from Everett Community College (Everett, WA) in 1976. Then he took pre-med courses at Western Washington University for two years, followed by a year in microbiology at the University of Washington.
But he was a single father with two boys to bring up, so he gave up college for a job with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Fisheries Service, studying the effects of sedimentation on young salmon. Then he worked at Everett Community College as a lab technologist for two years. In 1985 he joined Boeing's weights technology department.
"Weight is a big deal," he notes. "Everything has to be structurally sound, of course, but as light as possible. I would calculate the weight and then make changes and design the contract based on that."
In 1986 he joined the fuels and lubrication section of Boeing's materials technology group, then moved to the flammability group.
At work Spjut uses two flat-screen monitors. One magnifies whatever is on the screen up to twenty-five times. To control the computer, he uses a Dragon Naturally Speaking laptop program that responds to voice commands.
He also has Zoom Text, a screen reader and enlarger, and Magni Talk, which lets Dragon control Zoom Text. The Dragon setup is especially useful as Spjut has only limited movement in his neck and one arm after a run-in with a truck.
"The company has been wonderful in making accommodations for me," he declares. "The software is getting so good now that I can perform at the same level as the non-visually-impaired. It's a good feeling to know when I go home that I've put in a good eight hours."
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