Okay. We are going to start in a few minutes. We have 18 participants. Let''s just give it a couple more minutes and then we will start the session. Thanks. Hello, can everybody hear me ok? Claudia, maybe write in there that I am, okay, I see a thumbs-up. So, I think we are going to get started, realizing that people will be coming in as we start here. And I want to welcome you. I am Janet Peters, the Coordinator of the Accessible Technology at the Great Lakes ADA Center. This is part of our 2008 Accessible Technology Webinar Series, this is the third in our series, we have two sessions left coming up in August and September. Todays session is on Accessible Technology in Employment and the Workplace. It is going to be hopefully a great session. And our presenter, Anthony Tusler is an expert in this area. He is a writer, a consultant, trainer, advocate on disability issues. He has written curricular for the World Institute on Disability and has taught disability in America at Sonoma State University. He is the author of the book, How to Create Disability Access to Technology: Best Practices in Electronic and Information Technology Companies. His website, www.aboutdisability.com is the home for The New Paradigm of Disability: A Bibliography. He also writes and lectures about disability, arts and culture. We are recording this session today. So there will be an archive available with the transcripts. And if you have registered for this you will receive an e-mail that will give you the link where that web archive is available. And I would also ask that you participate by filling out the evaluation form and that link will be sent out to you via e-mail as well as sent, as well as on this thing. Please hold your questions until the end of the presentation. If you do have a clarification you can write it in the public chat and we will try to take care of it. And with that I think I will turn it over to Anthony.
Janet, thanks very much. This is very exciting for me to be involved in something like this. Even though I have been involved in high tech, this is my first webinar. So, here we go. One of the things that I am going to be doing is for any of you who are using screen readers, I will be reading all the information on the slide. There is not a whole lot on each slide nor are there any illustrations. Also what I definitely want you to do is if I use an acronym that you dont understand, I will try and spell them out but sometimes it just doesnt happen, so let me know and just you know give me the acronym with a question mark and I will explain it. So, I am Anthony Tusler. I am here in Northern California in Sonoma County. And we are going to be talking about the accessible technology and employment in the workplace today. One of the assumptions that I made when figuring out what it was to say today, after looking at the roster of who was signed in, was that most all of you are involved in either a governmental body or a nonprofit. And so unless I am clearly way off base that is the assumption that I am going to make today. So, one thing I want to make real clear before we start jumping into it is that there is not going to be a lot of nuts and bolts about, this is a screen reader, this is a screen enlarger, this is how it works, those kinds of things. I will talk about it in more general kinds of terms, but mostly what I will be doing today is giving you a way to think about technology in the work place and also the resources that you can use. And there is all kinds of resources out there that you definitely have to take advantage of, if you are doing anything about making the work place accessible, particularly for electronic and information technology either for yourself, for the employee, someone that you serve within the organization that you are in. Okay, so today, that is a lot of background isnt it? So for today, I am going to talk about some background issues. And why it is that we are here today in 2008, talking about these things. I am also going to quickly talk about some benefits to employing people with disabilities and then move into the steps in accommodating the individual. A lot of this is going to be processed along with resources for the nuts and bolts as I said. I am also going to be talking about corporate supports and -- I just discovered that how I numbered the slides is different. There we go, okay, I am in sync now. We are also going to talk about corporate supports, corporate processes and the stuff that really excites me is how you get a large organization to be more open to people with disabilities, support people with disabilities, particularly around technology issues. And when I say corporate what I really mean is large institution. I have worked at Sonoma State University for 22 years, which although it is not a huge university it is certainly a complex system and it is within, at the time I was working there, the 19 colleges and universities in that California State University system. So to get things done required a lot of finesse. And I think that is probably what is true in corporations as well as other governmental bodies. So why are we doing all of this? I got a question. I just want to Slide number 5 and it is showing all of the bullet points all at once, so I am assuming that is what everybody else is seeing. Is that right? Okay. Well, that''s fine. So we don''t get quite that surprised if the new bullet points coming on, but that is fine since these are really just talking points, I am not going to be providing a lot of information except for the resource links. So why are we doing this today in 2008? It is because the people with disabilities in the United States are still woefully unemployed, 35% of people with disabilities are employed full or part time and that is compared to 78% of the rest of the population. So, we are talking about 35% of us are employed versus 78% and that is a big number. And it is actually the number that when that was discovered back in 1984, it is what got the ADA passed. Because everyone in Congress looked at that number and said -- and these are approximately the same numbers that we had back in 1984. When Congress people looked at these issues, looked at these statistics, they said something needed to be done and they were willing to pass the ADA. I don''t think that personally they really understood what a profound change they were making in the United States to bring people with disabilities into the mainstream of society is a big difference and it has required a lot of work. And all of us that are on this today are people who have contributed towards making those changes. So, also besides the employment issues many of us, I am a person with a disability, I identify as a person of disability. Many of us live below the poverty line. So three times as many live in poverty with an annual household income below $15,000. And $15,000 these days is not a lot of money and so for three times as many of us to live below that poverty line, that is a pretty stunning statistic. So this is just to remind us all, we all know this, this is just to remind us all of why we are doing this work and the importance of doing this work. Excuse me. So let me talk about some access basics. And these are, once again, this is like a little Harris Polls, the National Organization on Disability, these are the basics just to remind us because we all know this. When I first started looking into electronic and information technology, one of the things that I realize was that I had to figure out a way to think about technology and think about disabilities in a different way than I had been thinking about them. Even though the ADA is general and the Section 504 is general about disability, we tend to think of disability in a very atomized way in that we think of different kinds of disabilities, different kinds of mobility, different kinds of vision, different kinds of hearing. One of the best ways to order technology is to think about, essentially what we are talking about is seeing, moving, hearing, and thinking. Seeing is, I think, the most profound issue in making things accessible. Once we went to the graphic user interface and technology which is in computers which is the Windows or Macintosh, the way we are looking at the world, that environment, that means that the ability to see becomes much more critical. When I am talking about seeing I am also talking about low vision, I am talking about blind, we are talking about blindness, we are talking about a number of different issues on how to make it possible to make technology accessible but it is all within that realm of seeing. The other categories, moving, those are for people who have a hard time using the keyboard, people who have a hard time accessing the technology in a way that it is currently set up. We make the assumption, or the world makes the assumption when they - excuse me, I just got distracted. The world makes the assumption that everyone has 10 fingers and those 10 figures worked real well when they designed this equipment. Hearing was less of an issue on the web, but it is becoming more and more of an issue as we get better and better sound technology. In fact, we are using it right now. As I understand it we have a live captioner who is providing real-time captioning. And the fourth category is one that isn''t talked about much when we talk about electronic and information technology, and that is thinking. And under that category, I am looking at learning disabilities, have people with intellectual deficits with distractibility, which I certainly fit under. And we have not looked particularly at web pages or how technology works to make them easier to use. And if we look at universal design, techniques which we will talk about in just a second, it would make the whole thinking category much easier for everybody. Let''s briefly go over the laws. Okay. So, we talked about the access basics. Who are we talking about? We are talking about people who have difficulty with seeing, moving, hearing, and thinking. So what are our touchstones? What you know what, really, why are we here today? What is the stick that is making us be here today? Primarily as I understand it, what is driving us all is the Americans with Disabilities Act Title I which is the employment provision. And that is a provision that says that people with disabilities cannot be discriminated against in the workplace. And that might be something easy for us to say, but for three years I worked in human resources and saw how the people there struggled and sometimes cut corners to not hire people with disabilities. It is ingrained in our culture that people with disabilities do not have the ability to do a lot of things and one of the prime ones is be able to work. And so the ADA Title I, although it has been cut way back by the Supreme Court decisions, still, it is the law and it is what is driving many, many companies to be much more careful about their processes in hiring people with disabilities. I am assuming that most of you or almost all of you know about Section 508 of the Disability Act and that was passed, actually, six or seven years ago. And what it says essentially is that for the federal government that all of the electronic and information technology equipment, software that they purchase plus the services they provide need to be accessible for people with disabilities. And I have to say that I tend to be a little cynical about what the for-profit corporations will do as far as providing access, most of them don''t recognize the disability market. And I didn''t think that they could move as fast as they did when Section 508 came in. I saw many software manufacturers suddenly take an interest in accessibility and just started providing it. And the most important area where that came in was with Dream Weaver and Go Live which are two software programs that help people make websites. Once those provided access features, and reminded people about accessibility, it meant that there is a multiplier there that we are going to start seeing accessibility in a lot of different places. 508 has also been the touchstone for a lot of people, states and cities and other nonprofits, they oftentimes use Section 508 as their guidelines to making things accessible. And there is a website there on www.section508.gov and that has a ton of information. This is the first resource that I am going to talk about today. And if you Google 508, this is the site that will pop up and it is a very deep site at this point. And it is the one that I first go to when I am looking for any kind of information. There is also finally states codes and regulations. Various states, California is pretty much following 508 but there are other codes and regulations. Both inaccessibility and unemployment, in California we have stricter employment laws than the ones from the ADA because we were fortunate enough to get the legislature to pass legislation that beefed them up. So it is important to look at, not only look at the federal government but it is also important to look at the states. So more interesting I think and more important is the guidelines that once you take a look at when making things accessible and a lot of this is around as I said electronic and information technology. And one of the key places to go even though they are only dealing with websites is WAI. And it is the web accessibility initiative at W3C. Okay, W3C are the people in Boston who set the standards worldwide for how the web will work. So there is guidelines on what HTML should look like. There is guidelines on what CSS cascading style sheets should look like. There is guidelines on how XML and I am not going to try to remember what the X stands for. But it is one of the newer standards on the web. W3C is the ones who set those standards so that everybody, so that my browser can see what you see when we go to different websites. And different websites all perform in kind of the same way. Not everybody strictly follows the guidelines, but they do in 98% of the time. In the W3C is the WAI the Web Accessibility Initiative. And this is a wonderful group of people who are looking at accessibility worldwide to the web and developing some wonderful resources in how to think about making the web accessible. And using their information it is a good way to look at how to make everything else in electronic, E&IT, lets start using the initials for Electronic and Information Technology, how to make E&IT accessible in general. So even though it only says only the web, WAI is a critical resource. And I would, if I have not tired you up completely at the end of this, the first place I would go after this is WAI and take a look at what they have got because it is really the prime place for resources. I would say actually the 508 site is secondary to WAI, that is my opinion. So it is at www.w3.org/WAI those are all caps. There are some other places. There is the CENELEC which is in French. So the English translation is the European Committee for Standardization and the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization. And the reason I put those up there is that it is exciting for me to see that the E.U., the European Union is looking at making things accessible in E&IT environment as well. Some of the resources and in talking to some people about the presentation today, they are going to be resources not in how to make things accessible, but the ways that you can help make things accessible within an environment within an organizational environment by looking at company policies. And it is critical for you to be aware of whether or not your organization has policies on whether there should be accessibility for your employees to E&IT beyond what the ADA provides or not. And if there is, how those are made? There is another place that I had not thought about till working on this and that is the vendors policies. Many of the vendors, so I am talking about, one of the people I talked to was at Oracle. Oracle has, how should I describe it, well it provides means by which companies in general, although I think that some governments are using it, customer relations and it is all on the web and it is all a way to integrate all of your information in a web based environments. One of the things that the guy at Oracle told me was that on their website, I have looked at it and it is there, there are ways to discover how to make Oracle accessible. And if you make the assumption like I would have that Oracle was not accessible with a particular piece of software or hardware because it didn''t work the first time out, if I didn''t go and look at how to make it is accessible with Oracle on their website I would have missed out on the whole lot. So let me explain that make sure I get this over. So it is important if you are having trouble giving a piece of the accessibility working with a particular piece of software, to look at the vendors website to see how to best do it and also to see if there is any tech support. I hope somebody said, huh, with a little emoticon. I hope that answers that. If not we will keep going. If any of you have a particular let me know. I am assuming once again, so another assumption, I am making a lot of assumptions here that you all know about universal design. And that is the notion that was developed in North Carolina that goes beyond just accessibility. And that when we build things, we are talking about particularly the built environment, and we are looking more at services and education these days but the primary focus has been on the built environment that it should be usable by everyone and that should include people with disabilities. If you use your universal design to design things, if you use the criteria that is in universal design then not only would it be usable for everybody but it would work for 98% of the people with disabilities. There will be people, there will be 2% that needs specialized accommodations and services but you have done a lot of the work upfront if you universal design. My favorite picture they use on the website, they used to use, illustrating universal design was it showed a front door to a house and to the left to the front door was a long window about 6 to 8 inches wide. It showed a girl who looked to be 5 or 6 years old, about 3 foot tall looking out that window and the assumption is she is looking to see who is coming up the walkway. That long window allows her at 3 feet to see who is coming and allows someone who is 6 foot 6 to see who is coming. And if somebody who has looked at the key holes and even accessible doors in hotels and realized that it would be tough for me as a wheelchair user to use, I appreciate that kind of universal design. So it is that notion that you build things so that it works for everyone. And in the E&IT biz, to be able to make things work for everyone it really does it these days. When I see my 87 year old Dad trying to use a computer, a little long way from universal design but we are getting better. So universal design, most importantly to those of us who might be advocating within an organization is, universal design is a strong way to advocate for accessibility. Instead of talking about the 10%, 20% or 30% of people with disabilities that would benefit, you are talking about 100% of the workforce customers whatever will benefit by making things more usable. And so the primary place to go for this is the Center for Universal Design and that is in North Carolina. There is also have in the website there is udeducation.org it is an education online, and so you can take an online course and get a quick way to find out the best way to universal, use universal design and what it is all about. And there is also when I was researching this up, something that I was kind of pleased to see was Design for All Europe and that is a long website that is on the slide which I am hoping people with screen readers would be able to use and the rest of you would be able to use. On my screen it is kind of a green which Microsofts power point wouldnt allow me to make that green any brighter. So I am assuming that there is easy way for you guys to get at that, if there is not I can post a, on my website, a way to get to them. So Design for All Europe, is Europe is looking at universal design as well, which I think it really pleases me that more than just the United States that other countries, the EU, Australia, Japan, many other places are looking at universal design and accessibility which means it is going to push it forward for all of us. Okay, lets look at people with disabilities in the workforce. I have been doing a lot of talking we are almost half way through and we are only to the tenth slide. So I am going to move this a little faster, because I wanted to talk about those background issues. This is all from the Department of Labor. If I was to prioritize the websites that I would use, if I was looking at accessibility and some ones that I do use, I would start with WAI, go to 508 and then finally I would go to the Department of Labor. It is a place that used to be not real friendly to people with disabilities but these days it has a depth, a real depth of information about how to make things accessible and why to make things accessible. And so I stole this directly, well not this first slide but in a couple of slides, from the Department of Labor. And so, why do we hire people with disabilities? For the employer, it is because there is a large pool of people that they are not using and if you look at the information out there and what the employers complaint about it is that they dont have a pool of people and why they are not using people with disabilities, I understand why but it is ridiculous that they dont because that is a primary concern and particularly as the baby boomers retire, they have lots of needs and they need to look at people with disabilities. When I talk about benefits for employees what I want to do is focus a little bit on the individual and that is what we are moving into, is look at the individual and then I will talk about the larger picture which is the organization and how to make change in the corporation. But some of the things that I have seen that employment provide for people with disabilities and this is true for myself in having good accessibility, it helps like productivity, it helps my knowledge how the works work, my ability to contribute, the quality of my work, my commitment to the job and actually my self-worth. And so what I am talking about here is, it is important for us to provide good accommodations to employees with disabilities because these are the kinds of things that are going to be important for them in their workplace. And these are the things that we want to foster. And if we can do that with accommodations providing services and equipment that will help people be accessible, these are the kind of benefits people will get. And so it is critical that we work for them. So if you go to the Department of Labor (www.dol.gov/odep) for the Office of Disability and Employment program maybe, I am assuming it is program. That is where the information is, and that is where I got this individual accommodation. So, here is the process. Here is what if you are working in an HR office, in human resources office, an employment office in a large institution, these are your checkmarks that you need to go through to make sure that the Department of Labor is happy so if there is a complaint or lawsuit you can show that you made all of these steps. You did all these steps and this is what your HR office is going to be happy about. So you have to notify the employee that there are accommodations available. I am hesitating here because -- Slide number 8. Whoops. Excuse me. You have to facilitate their request. You have to notify employees or people you are about hire that there is accommodations available to them even within the hiring process. You have to make it easy for them, you have to facilitate their request so that they can get those accommodations. It is important to analyze the jobs, to see what the essential nature of the job is. This is one of the things that the ADA talks about, and it is profound and is one of the things the Supreme Court has cut back on. But to look at what are the essential nature of the jobs and this is also where the HR offices cut corners. The essential nature of the jobs, we made the assumptions sometimes that people need the ability to be able to use 10 fingers to type when in a job that might not be the essential nature of the job, the essential nature of the job might be to be able to get information into a computer. And there is a lot of ways to be able to do that. And so looking at the essential nature of the job that is where you can spend a lot of time and that is where you need to use the resources available to you to figure out what are those. And if you are advocating for your HR office that is where you want to make them as broad as possible and not as limiting as they many times do. As I just said, you need to identify the functional limitations of the individual, no I didnt say that. Identify the functional limitations of the individuals because that will tell you about whether they can actually do the job or not. You have to determine potential accommodations. This is just, these are all the check marks. I am moving through them real quick because there is lots of information about that and these are really just steps that you go through and these are ones that you can spend decades learning how to do them well. So just touching on them briefly today. You need to determine potential accommodations. So you know the essential nature of the job, you know what accommodations the person needs and you know what the persons limitations are and then you need to determine the potential accommodation. And we will be talking a lot more about the resources and being able to do that. This is where the rubber meets the road really. Does it work for the individual? Does it work for the employer? Determine reasonable solutions, that is a critical place, sometimes employees have grandiose ideas about what they need and it really needs to be something that works for the organization as well. More often than not, what I found is that people with disabilities are not as knowledgeable what accommodations they can use. And so what is reasonable, often times when I was in this position I found myself advocating with the individual, with the new hire, the importance of using more accommodations than they had been using to make them more productive and all of the things I talked about before. Make the accommodation, you know, make sure that it gets there. I tell you, this is one of the places where organizations often times failed. Their procurement process, sometimes if you are working for a government agency can take months. You cannot leave a new employee without accommodations for months. You have to find a way for the organization to move quickly if you need to buy a piece of software or equipment. If you need to buy Jaws which is a screen reader for a blind individual, that individual cannot sit there for two months without that software. So figure out a way to make that happen quickly. That is another thing you can spend decades doing, is figuring out how to get a large organization moving. We will talk a lot more about that later. Monitor the effectiveness. And this is where I think it is critical and I think that most companies or organizations dont do a lot is you need to talk to the individual to see if the accommodation is working, the employee, you also need to talk to that persons supervisor and find out if it is working. And it might not just be whether the accommodations are working but whether the relationship between the employee and the supervisor is working, half the accommodations are fitting in a variety of things and this is where the real meat of it is. This I threw in, this is not in the check marks, this is my own thing which is you need to collaborate. You need to collaborate with the supervisor, and if you are the supervisor, you need to collaborate with the employee, everyone needs to collaborate with each other. Employee with the supervisor, supervisor with the HR department and vice versa. What it says here on the slide, is that you have to teach people how to provide useful feedback, that is one of the things that often times were not taught. And so as much as possible to be able to say this is why this is working, this is why this is not working, is critical. And the next thing I have on the slide is just like test pilots. One of the profound things that was told to me when I was interviewing people in E&IT companies who were their accessibility champions was that why dont we treat people with disabilities like they treat test pilots? When test pilots come back from a flight, they trained them to be able to say this is working this way, this is working that way, and what they do more than anything is they see the test pilots as somebody who is incredibly valuable within the loop. Often, more often than not, we do not treat people with disabilities, employees with disabilities as somebody who is valuable and who has important information to give. And that if we can make the person with a disability feel valuable and important, that is a critical piece to that. And sometimes that is an uphill battle within a larger organization. Okay, so, here you are, I am going to make the assumption that you are either the person that has to provide the accommodation because you are the supervisor or you are somebody working within the organization that has to know how this works or you are the person who is providing the muscle to make it work with the supervisor. So I am going to be talking from that perspective not from the perspective of the employee. So here is your resources if you are one of those people. First one is, if you dont have any mentors, if you dont have any shadow managers on how to provide accessibility that is one of the first things I would do if you are working in an HR office, human resources office and you are the ADA coordinator, and you dont have other ADA coordinators to talk to about how they do things, get on the phone this morning absolutely you need to have people who do the same things as you do to talk to. Because this is an emerging field, anything to do with disability is real new, even though the ADA has been around for 18, 17 years. If you are working in, if you are an employer, a supervisor, you need to talk to other supervisors. So build that network for yourself. Okay, there we go. Another important resource for you is disabled employee groups. If there is one in your organization, and there is more and more of them particularly in the for profit side, I am not sure how is it going these days in governmental or nonprofit but there is disabled employee groups and there is a lot of knowledge within those groups that could be helpful to you. And also if you are fighting to change policy or make things happen, they are great potential allies for you. The accessibility champion, this is a term that is used somewhat within large organizations. This is the person whose job it is to make sure the organization pays attention to disability, it could be the ADA coordinator, sometimes the ADA coordinator is not the accessibility champion and it is someone else. I am assuming that many of you play this role often and so if it is not you, you need to find out who the accessibility champion is and get that person on your side. Also if, thought just left my mind, oh well. You need to know the company 508 policies, these are more resources for you. What are the policies for accessibility and 508? If you dont know what the policies are, you dont know how to make things. What is possible and what is not and what needs to be change? As I was talking earlier the vendor of the software or the hardware that you might be using is an incredible resource. All of them just about that you will be dealing with have accessibility champions. They have people who have a ton of knowledge. They can also point you to other customers, particular with JAWS, they have listserv for JAWS users and just to remind you that small proprietary system, and what I am talking about is you know sometimes you are going to buy a special mouse and it is going to be a little company, sometimes they are going to be difficult to find out how to make this thing work and how to fit into your organization but so you will just have to wrestle with this and this is where your networks are going to be real helpful. Additional resources, dont forget the Department of Vocational Rehab, I found a lot of those people very knowledgeable because they are out there in the field talking to employers plus they are working with people with disabilities and know what the resources are. There are often times, well, sometimes they are local experts and there are non-profit and for-profit agencies out there that can be helpful. So you do those Google searches for your local communities and see what you come up with. Okay, more resources. There is a ton of resources, what I figure is, I am making the assumption that all of you out there bright, knowledgeable, putting the resources into your hands and pointing you the right direction is really the best thing I can do today. Some of the web resources that we havent talked about, Microsoft Enable, they have a whole section Microsoft does on accessibility, and they have had traditionally over the past 20 years the strongest accessibility unit of any large E&IT company. And one of the reason is they see accessibility of their products as a way to have market advantage, as a way for them to sell more products. What is important to Microsoft is to make money, if the accessibility component can make more money, they are going to get support and they have been supported. So there is a lot on that site. Oracle I put that up because they are doing a lot of good work these days and there is a lot, a ton of information on their site about how to make their software accessible and probably for other CRM (Customer Resource Management) programs, Oracle might be helpful. Section508.gov we have talked about. And finally or next to finally, there is the Job Accommodation Network, just Google that, it is JAN. And it is a large agency that is set up to help you with accommodation and they can often times be a help and they can give you individualized information. And finally there is a CSUN, CSUN Annual Conference and that is the CSUN conference pay people with disabilities and it is every spring in Southern California in the Los Angeles area and all the electronic and information technology people show up there plus Stevie Wonder shows up occasionally and it is cool to see him in the big hall way there looking at the latest cool toys. Okay, so moving onto, this is my thoughts, remember we have the checklist from DOL, Department of Labor? This is my thoughts really on the whole hiring and accommodation process, that from my experience it is the important, these are the important ways to look at it and then to get things to happen. When you advertise the position, it is important to get it out there the way people with disabilities are, sometimes Craigs list is the best place to do that, sometimes there are listservs, there is a variety of places and sometimes people with disabilities may not be looking for jobs but if you put it in front of them, that has happened to me, although I have met a person at a party who said I got this job that you might like and I did. It is a variety of ways and sometimes when you put that job in front of the person with a disability and they will say that is for me. Also within that advertising make sure the job is open to people with disabilities. In the interview process and the selecting process, this is where if somebody has a visible disability you can often times have trouble with the people who are doing the interviewing and the selecting, whether it is a supervisor, whether it is a committee. And this is where they need information about disabilities ahead of time. And to make sure that they know that there is both carrots and sticks in the hiring process, that they can get into trouble, that they can also get a better pool if they pay attention to people with disabilities. And the resources that are out there for accommodation within the organization, many of these people doing the interviewing and selecting do not know about all the resources and you might be the person who has to tell them. So make sure they know. Offering the job, it is important to talk about, there is no time when the employer and the employee are going to be listening to each other more than at the beginning of the hiring process. That is a critical juncture. And that is the point to provide information about formal and informal accommodations. The formal would be if there is a form and there should be a form for the person to formally request an accommodation. But there also informal accommodations when people say to their boss, hey, this would make my life easier. Regularly employees do that without disabilities, employees with disabilities should be reminded to do that too. And so it is part of the process to provide request forms and process, but I want to underscore the importance of having a formal process so you can track what happens. Because if you can''t track, you don''t know whether you are being successful or not, the organization being successful and you have no way to defend yourself in a lawsuit or an ADA complaint or very little ways. Training is a place where I think that things break down a lot. You provide the equipment, you provide the services and each workplace is unique, even if they are using the standard Microsoft Office products. The way they use those products, what they do is unique. And so you need to provide the equipment and service training with the accommodations so that people can be successful. I would try and figure out what the learning style is for the individual you are training or ask them because it is important to figure out the way for them to learn the fastest. I know that certainly when I try and show my wife, train my wife on the various computer things her learning style is different from mine and I have to do it the way that works best for her. And sometimes you know it is painful because I would rather do it my way. But for her to learn I have to use her style and that is true with employees you have to use their styles. And if you are the person that is doing this as the supervisor or the accessibility champion you have to be proactive, you have to ask questions, you have to observe. There is going to be a lot that goes on that the supervisor doesn''t ask, the employee doesn''t ask. If you are an employee you need to be proactive, you need to let people know what is going on. And let''s hope it is an open environment and you can do that. Some places do not encourage that and it is going to be more difficult. Supervising, this is tough. I am just looking at that time and I am realizing am going to have to lop off the part that is about my book so, which how to advocate within the organization. And if you are interested you can e-mail me or buy the book. But it is more about how to be an advocate. So let''s finish up this so that we can get a few questions in here. As a supervisor or if you are watching the supervisor it is important to gauge the usefulness of the accommodation, to monitor whether it is being used on an ongoing basis. Ask for feedback. Make sure the supervisor is asking for feedback. And here is something that does not happen very much. Set an appropriate level of expectation, neither too high nor too low for the employee with a disability. Often times people with disabilities, we set expectations too low, and it is one of the most pernicious ways of discriminating against people. In the performance evaluation, let''s hope you do this on a regular basis and not once a year but if it is once a year, so be it. If there is 360 performance evaluations which is where the employee gets to make suggestions, make sure that there is information about, in the document itself about accommodations, so that, that can be talked about explicitly. In the performance evaluation is the time when the supervisor can give feedback to the employee about the job they are doing and whether the supervisor thinks they might be using the accommodations better or to ask the employee, are there things that aren''t being done that should be. So it is important in setting goals that they include the accommodations and they use the accommodations, dont ignore it, it is easy to ignore it disability issues but I am assuming for all of us since we are on this webinar that disability is important for us. And finally once somebody told me as a supervisor, as a manager we need to have head, heart, and stomach for the job. The head is to know how it works. The heart is to have the passion to make it work and here is what is the hardest for me and many of us in mission based organization is the hardest to have the stomach for it. The stomach is to, that is the time when you have to fire an employee, that is the time when you have to tell an employee they are not doing a good job and figure out a way to help them do a good job. The stomach is doing the hard work that needs to be done. And sometimes we avoid that, but let me tell you, it is really important if you are a supervisor. So I am going to skip the slide on regulations and guidelines since we have covered it. I am going to jump right ahead to the meat of the book the idea which is how to create disability access to technology best practices in E&IT companies. And what it is really if you take a look at it is a variety of ways, it is an organizing manual really for the accessibility champion whether you are in a school, a non-profit, a governmental organization or a for-profit organization there are ways, there is information, ways to look at organizing the institution to make it more accessible and so I talked about that a lot in the book. It is only 72 pages. It is an easy read but we don''t have time for it. So do we have any questions out there?
Either use your microphone and talk and ask Anthony a question or you can go ahead and type it into the public chat and I will repeat it just for the sake of the captioner.
Hello? Hello? Anybody out there?
I have a question that came in to me Anthony via the e-mail from one of the participant that couldnt make it and they were wondering if you have seen an increase in the effort on software accessibility in the last few years or if the effort there is sort of stagnating?
Janet, I am assuming you the word software a little mouthful?
Software.
Okay. There I am. There has been a huge change. Section 508 made software manufacturers just move so fast and do so much. One of the things, I am primarily a Mac user, I use PCs because there is a lot of accessibility built into the whole Windows platform. But so I have been tracking Mac and 508, Macintoshs when Steve Jobs came back that is when he killed the newton and this would have been in around 2000 maybe 1999. He got rid of the accessibility unit in Apple. There were 3 people in it and he fired them. They were gone, the whole accessibility effort at Apple disappeared. When 508 came in, suddenly the operating system OS10 started to have lots of accessibility features. And there has been more and more to the point now where there is just a screen reader built into the operating system for the Macintoshes. I haven''t checked out what people are saying about Leopard which is the newest one, 10.5 but I do know under 10.4 that it was not the best screen reader that JAWS was still far better, but at least they are moving forward. And this is true for the other ones as well. So asked if software manufacturers complained accessibility without even being familiar with the standards they should use. You are right. There are documents, and I haven''t paid much attention to them like their initials maybe PAT but it is on their website that says this is why our software is accessible and this is why our hardware is accessible. And it is something that they file with the Federal government to say they are accessible. And often times they are not. They cut corners and they don''t know what they are talking about. If it''s not, if you are using software that is not accessible you need to talk to your organization on using software that is accessible and talk to them about the loss and how they apply and their employees who cannot access the software. There is also I would also double check a little more deeply with the manufacture to make sure that there is not something that you are missing. You know sometimes as I was told this happens with Oracle where they need to configure the software in a certain way to work with equipment such as JAWS. So what to do about those that software manufacturers that don''t want to make their software accessible? Well, find somebody to file a lawsuit. You know, well actually no, excuse me, allow them to do it right. Send them a letter, tell them what the problem is and see if they are working on it. One of the things that software manufacturers do a lot and get themselves in trouble is, they are working on accessibility, they are not telling anybody they are working on it. This is what happens to America On Line (AOL), they were working on making their site accessible but they didnt tell anybody, so the NFB the National Federation of the Blind filed a lawsuit and that forced AOL to then say, oh, but we are working on it and for everything to become much more clear. So actually send a letter, see what is what. If they don''t respond to the letter then the next step is a formal complaint and I would urge you to do it. We are almost out of time, any burning desires?
Anthony, can you move to the last slide so that people can see the link for the evaluation? Are there any last questions? Feel free to type them or go ahead and ask. I am going to put the link in the public chat area and e-mail it to you as well for the evaluation of the session. Any last questions? Okay, with that I think we will go ahead and conclude this session. And I encourage you to participate in the last two accessible online, accessible webinars that we have coming up in later in the summer and fall. And thank you for your attention. Thank you, Anthony for a great presentation.