Accessible workplaces - Damo McMorrow and Rebecca Clark (part 1)

Speaker 1 (THEME/ID)  00:07

It's up to you and me to shine a guiding light and lead the way, united by our cause we have power to pursue what we believe, we'll achieve the realisation of our dream... 

Speaker 2

Hello. welcome to New Horizons. I'm Vaughan Bennison, thanks for your company. This week we go back once again to the Round Table on Information Access for People with a Print Disability - and a two-part program on accessible workplaces. In this program we hear from Damo McMorrow who's the National Access Technology Manager with Vision Australia, and Rebecca Clark who's a Vision Technology Specialist with Quantum Reading Learning Vision.

Speaker 3 00:51

So with the move away from paper-based to more digital systems in the workplace, I think it's fair to say, and I don't think there would be too much disagreement, that there have been significant steps forward in terms of career opportunities for those of us who are blind or have low vision. However, technology and digitisation has caused some additional challenges that didn't exist previously. So we need to think about our digital workflows and how we manage them. Because accessibility in the workplace is not just a WCAG compliance tick, nor is it just purchasing someone a copy of JAWS or ZoomText and saying, You'll be right, mate.

We need to make sure that the workflows and the tasks that the person needs to do are accessible in inverted commas. But we also need to make sure that they're practical. I'm sure many of us have had the experience where we're told that a system or a site is accessible. And yes, indeed, everything on the page can actually be read. However, to save a client record, we simply have to hit tab 45 times, ensure we're facing north and press enter. So it's not really practical, and we end up with a fairly significant productivity gap there.

So when things don't work, what should we do? Should we be modifying the employer's systems? Should we be modifying the workers' access tools? So what we're going to do today is to try and explore that through a couple of case studies, people that I've worked with over the last 12 months, to illustrate what happens when all the moving parts come together and work fairly well. We're also going to talk a little bit about the landscape in terms of workplace modifications and the sorts of things that we can get easily funded and some of the common sort of workplace technologies. What I would like to do first, though, is to talk a little bit about what happens when accessibility doesn't work. So in order to understand what it's like when it works well, it's useful to understand what it's like when it's really bad.

So I'd like to introduce you to someone that, for the moment, I'm calling Person 49. It makes him sound like he belongs in a witness protection program. And we have, for the purposes of this presentation, changed all of the names to protect the innocent. So Person 49, as we'll call him for now, considered himself to be a fairly savvy JAWS user. He'd worked for 20 years in a variety of roles, senior technical roles and managerial roles. One of them was at a regional university where he managed, among other things, audio, visual and video conferencing services, desktop support and help desk. So you can imagine his surprise when, for the first time in his life, he hit some accessibility problems. He took a role at a small government agency. And for the first time in his working life, he discovered that almost all of the systems were completely inaccessible.

04:25

Some of them were old server-based applications from 25 years ago. Some of them were in-house applications that had been developed in-house. And in one case, the person who developed it no longer worked there and had, in fact, passed away. So not much chance of doing anything about the accessibility of that one. Some of the systems were government -wide systems. But unfortunately, the employer and the agency that was responsible for the system weren't particularly engaged in talking about accessibility or trying to remedy any of the issues.

And the last one was a very modern IT service management tool, which was used for logging IT support jobs and change requests and those sorts of things. The front end of that one was fairly accessible. But the administrator interface and the dashboard, which is what person 49 needed to access, were absolutely not. Furthermore, when asked about it, the vendor said that, A, they didn't think there was sufficient return on investment to warrant doing anything about the accessibility. And that, B, you could log a job. And in their learned opinion, that's all any blind person should ever have the need or desire to do. I don't know what made them think they were qualified to make that assessment, but that's how it was.

So the flow-on effect of all of that for person 49 was that he lost confidence in his own decision making because he only ever had about 20% or 30% of the data that he needed to have in order to make informed decisions. And with his loss of confidence, his team sensed that as well, and they lost confidence in him as a manager, which became an untenable position resulting in a fairly significant mental health issue and the person being unable to work for around about six months.

So what are the takeaways from that? Well, I guess one of the key ones for me is that accessibility or the lack of it affects real people. It's not just a tick box. It's not just a compliance thing that we need to meet. It affects real people and it prevents them from doing jobs that they're otherwise absolutely qualified to do. It prevents them from excelling in their chosen field of work. There's something else that I should probably tell you about person 49. And some of you may have worked this out, but for those that haven't, you're listening to him. I'm person 49, although I prefer Damo. It's kind of a little more catchy and easy to remember, but that was a situation that I found myself in in around about 2012, 2013.

Now, one of the things about being in a situation like that is that it, well, certainly in my case made me very passionate about trying to make it better for other people so that they didn't have to go through what I did. And that's why I've worked in this industry and found a career that I'm passionate about, why I've worked in this industry for the last 10 years and why I stand here talking to you today. So if there is some good to come out of it for me personally, that has definitely been it.

08:00

What else do we know and where are we from there from here? Well, fortunately, there have been some steps forward since then. So a lot of organisations are now using cloud based or web based platforms, things such as Salesforce and Pega and so on SharePoint, that do have some accessibility out of the box. So that's that's definitely a step forward. Products like JAWS have the ability to script web based applications which can improve the accessibility sometimes and address some of the gaps. Employers in particular government and corporate organisations do have at least now some awareness of the importance of accessibility and the need for systems to be accessible. 

The problem is that that doesn't always translate in practice to an accessible system. There are still gaps. Sometimes, you know, some of these barriers we we've been able to overcome sometimes, you know, as new technologies and new platforms are introduced, we end up encountering new ones. Also, sometimes what can happen is that the system is accessible out of the box. But the other organization themselves or their implementation partner develops a bunch of customizations, they don't necessarily understand accessibility.

And so the accessibility of the system, the final system goes backwards. And also the fact that often it's not validated. So organizations will buy a system and they'll, you know, believing that it's accessible, but there's no validation as the system is being built to make sure that those customisations don't break things. So in terms of the landscape, I guess, in terms of workplace modifications, in this country, for those of you that are not from Australia or those of you that don't sort of work routinely in the employment space, job access is a government funded scheme, which funds workplace modifications for individuals.

So the focus is on what are the individual barriers? What does that individual need to in order to perform the role? So things like screen reading software and those sorts of things. So I'll hand over briefly to Rebecca just to talk us through what some of those sort of commonly funded adjustments look like and the sorts of considerations that happen in terms of that part of the process.

Speaker 1 10:41

Thanks, Damo. Some of the considerations... like any, choosing any assistive technology, would be, what are the tasks that are involved that there's barriers to and assistive technology might assist with? Is portability of equipment important? What does the role involve? Are you moving around all the time? Do you have more than one workstation? Are you working in different locations? Sometimes there might be particularly in government organisations or corporates there may be restrictions such as using Bluetooth devices to connect or if there's access to especially now artificial intelligence tools.

So is there some sort of security restrictions around that? And sometimes employers government agencies will have a list of approved devices so that might come into consideration as well as obviously personal preferences on devices people might have used in the past and software etc. So again also some some software options have the option of being used remotely and again yeah using different workstations. So what are some of the key things that might be funded? So often it's especially with so much of work and roles being online and computer -based assistive software is crucial for many people so and it's important to trial.

Most of the software you can at least trial to check compatibility with systems but things like JAWS and ZoomTech are compatible with standard things like Office and Adobe and things but there may be workplace systems that might need scripting or other customisations as Domo was talking about and yeah you know is it suitable for the task involved in the role and the person's vision or other disability. So there's obviously magnification software like ZoomText which will magnify provide other color contrast enhancing pointers and doing some screen reading. There's these screen reading tools like JAWS which is going to read everything out on the screen but also be able to be used with Braille devices.

That can also be used can be adjusted to be used in a remote environment and there's also multi -user options if corporates and government go down that way and it's very customizable. So there's also voice recognition software so if people need input which can also be a productivity tool so you can control your computer with your voice as well as dictate and we also there's also literacy tools out there like Read &Write which will as well as doing text to speech will have writing prediction and other tools screen masking to help people with other print disabilities and other disabilities.

13:47

So JAWS will also do things like computer accessories things like ergonomic mice might be large print keyboards kind of thing as well as the support and training and with the software there's also maintenance and updates and all sorts of things to consider as well. So whether it is access to support and training with the particular software whether that be in-house in the organisation or external such as one of the agencies.

Speaker 2 14:14

And the second part of that presentation next week. And once again, thanks to the Round Table on Information Access for People with a Print Disability, and also to the presenters for allowing us the use of this material.

If you'd like to get in touch with Blind Citizens Australia, 1-800-033-660 is the number to call, 1-800-033-660. Blind Citizens Australia's email address if you want to get in touch, bca@bca.org.au.

In the meantime, I'll talk to you again next week. 

(THEME ID) 

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