One 26th April 1996 I went to a one day conference at the Interpoint Centre in Belfast, organised by the BCS Disability Group, on:
IT can be used to help disabled people live less restricted lives: an issue for the Citizens, IT and Communities part of the course. But this conference focused on IT and the employment of disabled people, an IT and work issue.
This is a summary of the notes I took at the meeting on the presentations directly addressing IT and the disabled.
There were also two talks not directly about the disabled, but about one of they ways they can work despite mobility problems: teleworking.
Adrian was a successful mechanical engineer and rugby player until he had a rugby accident which left him partially paralysed. He couldn't continue in his old career, so he retrained in computing, under the NCC.
He has since set up and developed his own business carrying out computing jobs for local companies who rely on his patience and persistence to get the job done.
Most of his work he does at home. Over the telephone no one knows he is disabled. He does the deals then does the programming, and delivers the results by modem. Once he has done his first job for a company, the respect he has earned does not disappear when he turns up in his wheelchair. He sets the price for his work by first asking his wife, then horse trading.
He also works half the day in a local company, so he is not so socially isolated as he would be if he worked all the time at home only seeing his wife.
Like most people self-employed in computing he has to keep updating his equipment and his skills. Working from home, he finds the telephone lines limited (at 28,800 bps) but cannot afford a dedicated data line as BT price them at levels that small businesses cannot afford-and disabled people's businesses are normally small. ISDN lines at 128,000 bps might help, but he hadn't heard of them until the meeting (so now...).
Similarly, the BACS banking transfer scheme costs hundreds of pounds for software, and hundreds of pounds for connection fees, making it uneconomic for all but large companies, unintentionally discriminating against Adrian.
Stephen Stewart carries out IT support for the trust, including input to an activity monitoring system.
He took on two disabled brothers on 10 day work experience from Enterprise Technology Ltd., an IT training organisation for disabled people. Then he took them on a placement of 2 days a week for 18 months, doing jobs such as clerical data input.
They couldn't speak very well, and had to lip read, but the staff got to understand them. In fact Stephen found that he had underestimated their skills and abilities: they had been trained to do much more than data input. At the end of the training period, a job came up, which they applied for and got.
Network Personnel run a flexitrain programme for people with physical disabilities such as paraplegics, ME and severe asthma sufferers, or mental disabilities such as agoraphobia. They have 30 places across the whole province.
They use free papers and other publicity to reach people in their own homes, then visit candidates for the course and discuss the whole programme with them, including skills, motivation and benefits when they finally get a job. Although adults can get £10/week on top of benefit levels on the Jobskills programme, larger families on supplementary benefit can loose benefit, such as some people in sheltered accommodation who loose benefit if they earn more than £10/week.
Trainees learn at home, using a computer, modem and training materials installed and lent by Network Personnel. As well as working through the training course to get an RSA NVQ in IT, they have 1 to 1 tuition once a month, and weekly on-line tutorials. They use PC Anywhere so that the tutors can see what is on any trainee's screen.
After the course, they get careers guidance in making use of personal contacts. Some telework on contracts put together by Network Personnel, so that the employer can deal with a single company instead of lots of individuals.
He described two government programmes.
A scheme to lend equipment to employers to enable a disabled employee to carry out the work. Equipment provided includes voice activation equipment and adaptive software (such as screen readers or magnifiers).
Their needs are assessed in the workplace by a Disability Employment Adviser in the first place, then by specialists where needed. They make use of the European Handynet CD-ROM database of technical aids.
An inter-agency project to develop a back office business employing young people with learning disabilities.
This has the great advantage that they can learn at their own pace, however slow, and can use specialist software designed for their needs.
Depending on their ability levels they can design posters or pamphlets, input data or word process. Many tasks do not require good literacy or numeracy.
The young people have also successfully completed work placements in NIE, NITB and Barnados.
The Disability Discrimination Act started to come into effect on 8 November 1995. Consultation documents have since come out for comment on:
After the consultation, regulations will be drafted and come into force, starting in December 1996 with the employment provisions and the first rights of access to goods and services. It will be illegal to discriminate against disabled people (those unable to carry out their normal day-to-day activities for at least 12 months) in these areas, including recruitment, transfer, promotion, training and dismissal. But there are exceptions.
There is the idea of a reasonable adjustment to make working conditions equally accessible to disabled people. This will be different for different employers. A large company might modify access throughout a building, whereas a small company would not be expected to bear such an expense.
The employment provisions will only apply to businesses of >20 people, and not to the armed forces, police or fire authorities. But even the smallest companies cannot discriminate in the provision of goods and services. To the surprise of John Sayers from LEDU this will apply to the information they supply to the public. At present none of their brochures are available in large print, Braille or on cassette for their partially sighted.
Geoff Busby gave most of his talk using his speech synthesiser, of the type made famous by Stephen Hawking, since he has speech problems that make communication a challenge to overcome.
He described how the BCS Disability Group started in 1975, initially raising awareness among IT professionals at trade shows, and encouraging training courses. Now they run:
He is keen to see what new technologies can do to help him, including Virtual Reality so he can have experiences that don't limit him to his wheelchair, and Artificial Intelligence that predicts his needs, to save him struggling with the equipment.
He described a training programme they set up in NI, and now want to get out of: Sightline to work.
This is a distance learning programme specially designed for blind people. It's not just a standard IT training course with speech synthesisers. How do you explain headlines and fonts to people blind from birth?
Before 1995, blind people had to go to England for a year for IT training. Now trainees work from home and also at residential weekends.
It's a modular course teaching Word Perfect, Dbase and Supercalc skills, which has achieved a lot of examination successes.
Now he wants to get out of the business. So the RNIB is putting together a new project: GRAVITATE. This will be a PG Diploma course for IT trainers in how to train the blind, in which they will learn about their special needs, including going through a training course themselves while wearing special spectacles to simulate visual impairment. The diploma is accredited by Oxford University.
Hilary runs a centre that assesses the needs of people with communication and speech problems, identifies which equipment is most suitable, and does the medical work needed to ensure that it does not make their condition worse.
She is giving a talk in our lecture on Friday 3rd May 1996, so make your own notes on her work.
The Communication Advice Centre offers:
For example, people can try out lightwriters (a keyboard with two LCD strips facing both user and listener, and a speech synthesiser), or scanning software that scans through all the keys until the user clicks on a button with whatever muscle function he or she still has.
Once the best equipment has been identified, the health services may pay for something to back up speech, or employers or education authorities might pay for equipment to help their work or studies.
A teleworker is someone who works:
Joe doesn't waste time commuting into and out of Belfast, so can work more. But is means he can carry on beyond 1700, so his wife thinks he is working all the time. But as he only sees his boss a few days a week, his boss thinks Joe is not working.
Why telework?
A teleworker might be
For example, one man publishes 8000 copies of Belfast Murders every quarter, done on his Apple Macintosh at home, then sent on disk to a printers. Many teleworkers are like the outworking weavers and tailors of our past. But it is no longer a loom that is kept at home.
Just as the postal dispute of the mid-1980s led to the adoption of FAX machines, the British Rail dispute in 1994 led to a lot of emergency teleworking.
In 1996 there were:
Teleworkers can now make use of:
She distinguished four types of teleworking:
KITE was set up to provide work without having to leave a part of rural Fermanagh, near the border. It took several years to get the funding to set it up, as in the mid-1980s no NI or UK agency was willing to fund "high-tech" industries in rural areas. Ironically, British, German and Canadian overseas aid bodies were funding such rural industries in Africa and Asia at the time. But they did not include parts of Fermanagh in the Third World.
Eventually, they got funding from 7 different EU programmes to a total of £160,000, towards their start-up costs of £240,000. They arranged child care, did a lot of training, built their centre and paid for an ISDN line to be laid for 9 miles from the nearest digital exchange, and set about marketing their services.
Their work involves:It's about 50% international trade, 50% UK and multi sectoral, so they are not too dependant on any one market. After 2 years trading they have 15 employees and are about to expand to around 25.