Accessible workplaces - Rebecca Clark and Damo McMorrow (part 2)

Speaker 1 00:07 (Program Theme)

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Speaker 2 00:20

Hello, I'm Vaughan Bennison. Welcome back to New Horizons. This week, part two of our discussion of accessible workplaces, our presenters are Rebecca Clark, Access Technology Specialist with Quantum and Damo McMorrow, National Access Technology Manager with Vision Australia.

Speaker 3 00:43

There's also, for those with low vision, electronic magnifiers. So there's a whole range of these, obviously. But with different features like the magnification, color contrast, being able to freeze images, they all come in a range of sizes. So some of the considerations would be, do you need something portable? What are you trying to read labels? Are you trying to write and fill in hard copy forms? Do you need something desk-based? Something you can take into meetings with you? So some of them include text -to -speech. So if you've got visual fatigue or need that extra support, do you need a distance camera for looking at presentations? So all that can be considered in trialing different options to come up with what might be the most suitable solution for your particular role.
There's also now a lot of text-to-speech devices. 

So again, do you need something portable that you can carry around and just snap and read text as you need? Or are you looking for something more desk-based or that you can save your files to? Again, do you need something that can read in the distance? Is there a selection of language voices that you prefer? And the different controls. So again, it's important to trial the different options and work out exactly what tasks you need. So one of the other options that's often funded are braille displays and note takers. So again, there's a range of things on the market. So again, whether they'll connect to your workplace systems, are you looking for something that's an all-in-one note taker that you don't need to attach to a computer or you're looking for something that'll attach to your mainstream device or both?

There's all these sorts of considerations that you might want. Have you got a preferred, the feel of the braille? So, and how serviceable things are. So yeah, again, they're great for things like presentations, as Damo's doing here. And also entering, particularly if people are doing coding or music or Excel spreadsheets or something, trying to read and get the accuracy of the information. So there's a huge array of technology on the market. So assistive technology providers can help provide information and access to devices and software to trial. So employees may already have preferred devices and all types of devices that they already like. And also trialling software is, and things is really important, as well as the support and training afterwards. 

So, and not just training's important, obviously at the beginning of a role, but it might be also further down the track if either vision conditions or situations change, roles change, or new systems are introduced. Looking at all of that sort of array of technology and that sort of thing, where are the gaps? So job access won't fund things like work effort required to make an employer's system more accessible. They understandably see that as an employer responsibility.

04:07

The exception to that is JAW scripting, obviously. They also won't fund things like training for developers to show them how to improve or fix the accessibility. And there are a number of caveats on things like physical modifications, like tactile ground surface indicators and so on that are tied in with the building code. So let's have a quick look at a couple of case studies just to sort of show how we address some of those gaps. 

Speaker 4

Muhammad's situation illustrates what happens when all the moving parts eventually come together and work well. So Muhammad works for a federal government agency in a role where he is tasked with investigating suspected cases of fraud. This requires him to use a web-based tracking system where he can review all of his files, make notes, review various attachments and so on. He does have a degenerative vision condition. And so he's recently begun making the transition from ZoomText magnifier reader to Fusion. And eventually he'll steadily increase his reliance on JAWs to the point where he'll be using that almost 100% of the time.

Job Access had provided Muhammad a copy of ZoomText Fusion along with several hours of Access Technology training to help him get the most out of it and a software maintenance agreement. They also funded a desktop and a handheld video magnifier because he often does need to look at handwritten and hard copy documents. It quickly became apparent though that there were some significant problems with the web -based tracking system and using it with JAWs. And some of those issues were things like report output wasn't readable, list boxes and combo boxes that don't read, buttons and dialogues that don't speak particularly well.

And elements in the system that worked fine in one screen and didn't work well in another. That was about 70% of Muhammad's role. So that presented a fairly significant issue in terms of his employment and how much of the role he could actually undertake. So in that situation, the employer engaged us because they weren't really sure where to go from here. So Vision Australia's Access Technology team went through and we actually, because it's the sort of thing that you can't just test using some of the sort of compliance tools or audit tools, we actually went through and had to test each individual workflow and provide a report to the employer on all of the issues in all of the different screens and functions of the system.

The platform itself was actually quite accessible as I mentioned earlier. The problem came because the organization had done a lot of customisation and the developers were unaware of the fact that the platform vendor had actually provided extensive documentation to say, if you need this to be accessible, don't use these modules, use these ones. So the problem was not in the underlying platform but rather in the customizations that have been done. So in addition to that audit, one of the things that we did was actually provide some training for their in -house development team so that they actually understood how someone using a screen reader actually navigates the system.

07:53

And it meant that they could actually progressively test things themselves. One of the nice things about that was that the developers themselves actually became really strong, passionate advocates for making the system accessible and for fixing it. They developed a bunch of standards and templates and guidelines to make sure that once they'd made it accessible, it would stay that way. So that was a really nice benefit. As part of that, we started to see a cultural change within the organization and they started to say to us, well, we wanna keep it accessible now so that we can employ other people who are blind or other people with low vision into the future.

So as with a lot of these things, it's always sort of part of it is fixing the systemic issues and some of it is overcoming the attitudinal barriers and that sort of education piece. The other case study that I want to quickly talk through is an organization who I can't mention because for commercial reasons, but I'm calling them the proactive employer because they already had some blind or low vision staff in their teams, and they had a project where they were integrating their Salesforce client management system and their Amazon Connect phone system so that a person could, if they're delivering a counselling service, could sort of answer the call and make all of their case notes and file notes and things like that all in the one screen to try and improve efficiency.

They asked us to do two things. They asked us to once again check all of the workflows, and they also asked us to take a look at their training material, their induction material, and we found a couple of interesting things. The system itself was a Salesforce-based platform and they hadn't really customised it much at all, so the Salesforce component was actually quite accessible. We did have a couple of issues with the phone system integration, but we were actually able to work with the developer to resolve most of those, and the ones that we couldn't, we were actually able to resolve with a little bit of simple JAWS scripting.

Where things sort of fell apart really though was on the training side of things. So when we had a look at the training, a lot of the training modules, because it was a counselling service, required people to interpret body language, and there was no audio description, and you couldn't honestly tell from the dialogue enough to be able to answer the questions fully. So in that situation, what we actually did was conducted an audit of the training system and provided examples of what accessible training should look like, and where the accessibility barriers were.

Again, it was a question of working with and educating the content providers to help them to understand what was actually needed. But the nice thing in that situation was that the employer was extremely proactive. They got us in before the change happened, they didn't ring us the week before and say, hey we're launching a new system next week, can you pop in and just tick the accessibility box for us please? So that was good that they did sort of get in ahead of the game, and so we were actually able to make the the material accessible before it was needed.

11:37

I just want to quickly conclude by sort of stepping through a couple of learnings from some of this. So we are I think very fortunate to have schemes like Job Access, which can fund the assistive technology tools and the training in how to use them. The problem that we're seeing increasingly is that having the right access technology tools is only part of the solution. Ideally what we need is a situation where employers have an awareness of accessibility for a start and actually prioritise accessibility at the procurement stage and validate that things are in fact accessible. We also need employers, access technology professionals and staff workers in the blind and low vision community to all come to the table with an open mind and a willingness to learn and a willingness to collaborate.

Organizations need the right training so they can first of all understand what the accessibility barriers are and where the gaps are, but also to make sure that they don't inadvertently create additional accessibility barriers along the way, because we know from person 49's example that those barriers are what prevent someone who's blind or low vision from working as equals with their colleagues and excelling in their their chosen field of work, and I'm sure that for most of us that is the ultimate goal. So when I look at where we are and where we've come from, While there is still a lot to do, and we're still finding new and different barriers and challenges every day, every time we have a new platform or a new system, every time we introduce AI features that get us part of the way there, we do encounter new challenges.

But I do believe that there has been a significant step forward in terms of awareness of accessibility and a genuine desire to try to make things more accessible. And I think that we have better tools potentially than we've ever had before. So I am confident that if we keep going in this direction, we can change both the statistics and the narrative around unemployment and underemployment in the blind community. And that certainly makes me feel confident and gives me the passion to keep going.

Speaker 2 14:17

Damo McMorrow ending that presentation. If you'd like to get in touch with Blind Citizens Australia 1800 033 660 is the number, 1800 033 660 - or you can email bca@bca.org.au ... BCA at BCA dot org dot AU. In the meantime I'll talk to you again next week. 

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