New Technologies For New Career Opportunities
by Peter BRASS
In a time when traditional job opportunities for the blind and visually impaired are rapidly disappearing, it is paramount that organizations active in the blindness arena are trying to locate so-called niche opportunities in the job market to be opened for our clientel. The internet as a whole and web-based services in particular play an ever increasing role in today's labor market. It is therefore of the utmost importance that we demand equal access to these facilities. I will not pick up the accessibility discussion here, suffice it to say that the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) and the E-Europe campaign are already important stepping stones along the road to equal accessibility. This general theme will, however have to be in the back of our heads permanently when we consider new approaches to employment of the visually impaired.
New technologies for new career opportunities is the theme set for me in this presentation, but please allow me to stray a little from the path laid out by our conference organizers. I am not going to bore you by enumerating the gadgets and pieces of equipment at the disposal of blind and visually impaired people today. Reasonable computer access, relatively good optical character recognition (reading systems) and a number of telecommunications facilities are no longer revolutionary items in most of the industrialized countries. They have been around for some time, it is true, they still need improvement, and, fortunately, they keep improving, but we are looking at a relatively small population, so we will always have to catch up to the mainstream. At some point in the future a "design for all" philosophy may reduce the necessity for this constant chase. But apart from technology itself, which is a core component in the acquisition of new job opportunities, let me briefly touch on 4 other equally importanct concepts:
Mobility, Flexibility, Useability, Encouragement.
-
Mobility refers to the provision of the means to get to the job.
-
Flexibility implies the willingness to accept flexible working hours as well as the ability of team integration.
-
Useability does not only refer to the user-friendliness of equipment, but it also encompasses the need to acquire the necessary skills to use the technology. Schools and other educational agencies will have to strife for and maintain high standards in training. And the time factor needs to be taken into account as well. Motivated as our students may be, they will always encounter a steeper learning curve and an extended timespan to achieve mastery of new skills.
-
Encouragement finally means strengthening of self-esteem, employing the spirit of our self-help movements and the provision of positive role models.
Turning back to the importance of technology for job integration, I would like to focus on
2 examples taken from real life.
A
young blind man with a good education and solid IT skills living in a major german city, came across an ad of a taxi company looking for a dispatcher.
After some initial hesitation, the employer was willing to face the challenge together with his potential employee. Using state of the art access technology showed a few problem areas in using the company's software. But since the software in question is commonly used by a majority of taxi companies all over Germany, the employer decided to contact the manufacturer. Together with the screenreader vendor they managed to eliminate the difficulties even improving the software for everybody in the process. The money to fund this project came from the rehabilitation resources of the labor administration. This measure had not only leveled the playing field for one person, it has created new job opportunities for other visually impaired people since the software is widely used.
A
blind journalist working at a public radio station experienced a completely different situation. He almost lost his job when the whole network switched to a gui-based production software. Having expected such a change, he had been looking around to locate an accessible solution, and he had come up with 2 or 3 alternative software packages. By using a different piece of Software than the rest of the staff, he could have produced his work in the common format and feed it into the station's local area network for other people to see and/or use and for filing purposes. His arguments that - because of the special hard- and software that he had to use anyway - his work had to be done at a particular workstation were ignored by management who insisted that the same software be used all over. Eventually this problem was solved by a general transition to a different software package, not, however because of accessibility considerations but because of financial deliberations.
In order to make full use of the potential of new technology, research activities must be encouraged. To emphasize this point, I briefly want to mention 3 projects, one recently completed, the other 2 still in progress:
1. PROBIQ Partner organizations with an educational as well as technical background got together to develop a curriculum and the necessary course materials to qualify blind IT experts to use a modern programming environment, in this case Borlad's C++. The curriculum and the materials were pilot tested and fine tuned to result in a six-months training program to enable blind and visually impaired people to write software using this highly popular programming language under gui-based operating systems. Another stepping stone for new career opportunities.
2. VISUAL One of the main objectives in this project is to develop software to present electronic learning content on the internet or in an intranet in a way to make it accessible and intuitive for the visually impaired learner. Life-long learning is not just a catch-phrase, it has become reality. Most jobs today can no longer be successfully held after solid initial training or education. Already today but even more so in the future, changing job requirements set a constant challenge to acquire new skills and knowledge. And this is increasingly done through e-learning. Many university courses, sometimes even complete degree programs, are already offered in this way. But also single skills or components of various work environments are presented in this fashion. So e-learning, its presentation and accessibility will require a great deal of attention from educators, technitians and content providers to ensure inclusion of the visually impaired community in this tremendously important area.
3. ECDL The European Computer Driving License is already established as a relevant qualification for employees in many different sectors in the workplace. Already in a few countries there is work going on to make this package of IT skills accessible to the visually impaired. In the eyes of many employers the ECDL already is a firm standard similar to a highschool diploma or some comparable achievement. If we as educators of and advocats for the blind can manage to equip our clientel with such a recognized certificate, we will be able to open a few more doors to the job market.
But maybe even more important than the technological aspect of our endeavors is the creation of awareness among potential employers that their future employees are not only technologically savvy but also mentally and physically prepared to face new challenges and succeed in a highly competetive work environment.
Back to "European Employment Conference" Contents