How Technology Brings Blind People into the Workplace
In these days of low unemployment, many corporate and other organizations find it necessary to track the whereabouts and profiles of underused sectors of the labor pool. One sector seldom tapped by business has an unemployment rate as high as 70%—even though the advent of new data-processing technology has opened a window of opportunity for the group. What’s more, people in this sector who do find employment historically have had a lower than average turnover rate.
They are the thousands of sightless or visually impaired people who possess desirable skills but who have difficulty finding work, or at least work commensurate with their skills. Many of them have received training as computer programmers, but there are quite a few other functions where blind persons have worked effectively, including customer service and repair service representatives, staff writers, quality control inspectors, receptionists, and curriculum specialists.
The advent of the microchip has been a boon for people with vision loss. Information encoded as a magnetic signal in a computer can be variously decoded into speech (through a speech synthesizer), braille (through a hard-copy printer or a refreshable cassette tape), or enlarged print visible on the computer monitor. Other recently developed aids include a computerized tape recorder that enables the user to speed-read by ear and a talking calculator.
The result has been a virtual explosion of opportunity for independent reading and writing by people who cannot use print. No longer do they have to depend on someone else’s eyes to translate printed information. This technology revolution has forced corporations to rethink notions of the physical limitations on job performance in information processing.
Let’s look in on a job interview held by several skeptical telephone company division managers. The applicant, Russell, blind since the age of two, had had five years of experience as a customer service representative with a government agency before attending a computer programming school. Russell demonstrated a device attached to a computer that allows the information on the screen to be read in braille on a tactual display. While he talked about his research in adaptive devices, he wrote a program to perform a simple data sort and then inputted the names of his interviewers. As the screen displayed the sorted material, Russell read it aloud by means of the attached display.
Intrigued, the managers showered him with questions about debugging programs and the comparative versatility of braille and speech in accessing visually presented information. He answered them readily while he broke down the equipment and packed it up. As he left, Russell offered to show them “a piece of the most impressive technology ever developed,” and in one motion he snapped his folded cane into extension.
Earlier, several of the managers had expressed reservations about bringing a blind person into the department. “What if there were a fire?” one asked. “How would he find his way to the restroom?” another wanted to know. But their interview with Russell convinced them that he would be an asset, so they offered him the job.
Gambling with the Unknown
One employment roadblock for the visually impaired job seeker is the view most sighted people hold about a blind person’s dependence and passivity in the world. From this stereotype, it’s a short step to the assumption that a fast-paced corporation is no place for a person without sight. It takes exposure to a person like Russell to explode these misconceptions; on the strength of his personality and his talent, he was able to put his listeners at ease.
To many managers, hiring a sight-impaired person is taking a big chance. An executive once said to me:
“The main risk on my mind was that I might have to let her go. I figured this person had suffered enough in her lifetime, and now, what if she really can’t perform? I don’t think we would have fired her, but we would have found her a different job.”
For three years in the mid-1980s, I coordinated the Perkins Project with Industry, a federally financed project to expand job opportunities in New England for people with visual disabilities. Together with our colleagues at the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind, we encouraged our corporate clients to expect the same quantity and quality of work from visually impaired employees as they would from sighted employees, and to supervise them accordingly.
The results of our placement efforts were various: some blind employees learned their jobs and stayed on; some moved up; others quit to return to school; some got laid off or never mastered their jobs and were terminated. The same happened to their sighted peers. But certainly, most of the people we helped are either still holding their initial jobs or have advanced to better positions in the same or different organizations.
It was crucial for the employers with whom we dealt to find out the reality of a blind person’s independence, which belies the misperception of dependence. When someone who is sighted observes how a person with vision loss manages in the world, and manages differently from a sighted person when necessary, the demystification of the disability begins. At that point, the sighted person starts looking past the disability to see the person behind it.
The feeling that blind people are somehow different—as though in experiencing the world differently, they are living in a different world—is often responsible for the rejection of a candidate early in the job application process. The manager’s question, “Will I be comfortable working with this person?” is a legitimate question, often answered negatively because of a lack of information and familiarity.
Few of us can view calmly the prospect of spending time with someone we perceive as being very different from ourselves, for we fear not knowing what to do. In not knowing what to do, we risk appearing foolish. The Project with Industry aimed to give employers the information they needed to become more comfortable, especially information about the disability and about the types of job adaptations in place around the country.
Time after time, we observed that once a manager had decided to make the move and incorporate a blind person into his or her work group, the climate there became a very positive one for the new employee. The failures were always due to factors other than vision limitations, factors that can disrupt any employer-worker relationship. Yet even in those cases, the work group often felt a strong desire to recruit another visually impaired or blind person. They had an investment in the cause.
Even so, the problem of social isolation in the work setting has to be dealt with. A month after hiring a blind individual, an executive described the social situation this way: “It’s easy for a sighted person to go visit somebody in the next department. But Sharon can’t do that. A sighted person can see that someone’s busy and decide not to interrupt. So Sharon, as a result, just stays in her office. It’s up to everyone else to come by and say, ‘How are you doing?’ And most of them won’t because they feel embarrassed. Nobody asks her to go to lunch because that takes a little bit of effort: you’ve got to be able to guide her. It’s very uncomfortable for somebody who isn’t prepared for it, unless you’re a strong personality.”
This executive arranged for his group to participate in a workshop that featured role playing and discussion of the facts and misconceptions about blindness. Back in the workplace, the manager noticed that employees seemed to feel more at ease with Sharon, and she was less shy with them.
He also devoted some thought to how he could communicate with his subordinates in a way that would not exclude the worker with limited sight. He learned to use the office’s electronic mail system instead of relying on handwritten or typed memos, and he encouraged everyone in the office to do the same. The result was clearer communication for the entire department. His supervision of the staff improved, he was convinced.
Corporate Initiative
In this age of 6% unemployment, organizations looking for talent may have to do some creative recruiting. Individuals with little or no eyesight can be prime candidates for those recruiting efforts.
The first step should be an analysis of the problem from a logistical standpoint. What are the visual requirements of the jobs available? Can any reading demanded in the job be done with a computer screen? Other factors include the layout of the building, the frequency of disruptive environmental changes, and the expectation of field travel or out-of-the-office meetings. None of these factors precludes consideration of a blind person, but it’s important to discuss all these job components with the candidate.
Every job deserves to be considered with a particular person in mind, partly because it’s essential to understand the applicant’s visual capacities. Most legally blind individuals have enough functional vision to use large or regular print. The applicant will probably have a reading preference among the options of regular or large print, braille, or a personal reader. It is also important to determine whether the applicant gets eyestrain when reading from a computer screen.
The rehabilitation agency for the blind in any state, often called the Vocational Rehabilitation Commission, has specialists who help organizations in recruiting and in adapting jobs to the needs of candidates. Such agencies in many states lend adaptive devices to blind people to use on the job.
Rehabilitation specialists can help an employer investigate appropriate devices and can advise him or her on applications for tax advantages connected with purchases of this equipment. Another resource is the local Project with Industry, from which businesses can get help through networking activity.
In some states, rehabilitation agencies have built excellent communication networks with privatesector employers, and both benefit. In other states, rapport has not been established, and differences in vocabularies and technological expertise present obstacles. There are enough successful collaborations, however, to serve as models for any corporation interested in pursuing this idea.
When initiative from employers is backed with expertise from the public organizations specializing in help for visually impaired job seekers, this resource can be better exploited for the benefit of both employer and worker.