VCU WEBCAST TECACCESS OCTOBER 22, 2002 2:00-2:30 EST
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>> TERI BLANKENSHIP: Hi and welcome to the RRTC webcast on telecommuting and people with disabilities. I'm Teri Blankenship. Thank you for joining us today. Before we get started, I wanted to mention a couple things. First of all today's webcast will be archived for you and we will e-mail you the link tomorrow so you can access it. Also, as most of you know, the webcast is open captioned. You can click on the open captioning link on the Web cast page if you need this feature. Today you'll be able to submit your questions in the live chat room following the webcast. You will need to stay in the chat room to see the answers because the presenter will not be on camera to answer the questions today. She will be in the live chat room. It is now my pleasure to introduce our presenter today, Debra Ruh. She is the president of TecAccess. Over 75 percent of the employees at TecAccess are people with disabilities. Debra will share with us why she chose to start a telecommuting company and she will discuss some of the successes and obstacles that she has had along the way. Let's get started. Now I'd like to turn the program over to Debra. >> DEBRA RUH: Thank you, Teri. I'm the president of TecAccess. My name is Debra Ruh and today's topic again is about telecommuting and people with disabilities. I'll start the slide show. At TecAccess, we are a small women-owned company and 78 percent of our staff are people with disabilities. We specialize in IT accessibility and section 508 solutions. In 2001, part of the Rehabilitation Act, it was upgraded, and Section 508 encouraged the -- well, legislated that the United States government would -- everything that they procured from that point on, anything that has anything to do with IT, products, services, hardware, software solutions, would be accessible to people with disabilities, especially people with severe disabilities. So being a company that hires primarily people with disabilities, we thought that this was -- it made sense for us to offer these types of services. We were already an IT company and we wanted to expand and help IT accessibility become a reality. Not only do we employ persons with severe disabilities, we also provide services that support people with disabilities at the same time. Again, 78 percent of our team are people with disabilities. We have quite a few people with severe disabilities on our team and we have people with slight and mild disabilities at the same time. Those of us that are not persons with disabilities, almost all of us are parents of children with disabilities. I have a 15 year old daughter with Downs Syndrome, and a lot of us are parents, and all of us are advocates of people with disabilities at the same time. Even though we are a company, an IT company, that primarily hires people with disabilities, we are -- we are really making a lot of headway. We have some really big clients, Cannon, Circuit City, the United States Navy, USDA, to name a few, and we are telling a really good story. So we don't consider, even though we are a company that primarily focuses on hiring people with disabilities, we don't consider it to be a pity party. We consider it to be that we have a lot to offer and we are offering it to corporations all over the world at this time. So we feel that if you are going to legislate laws by the Americans with Disability Act or the Rehabilitation Act, then you may as well at the same time make sure that people are -- that we are helping to bring some of these unemployment rates down at the same time. Some of the solutions that we offer at TecAccess, I'll talk a bit about that first. And then we are going to get into telecommuting or telework, and I'll tie those two together so that you can see why telecommuting or telework, which is what the government is calling it, is something that really worked for our company. We do section 508 compliance assessment planning. If you sell to the United States government, you do have to be section 508 compliant. And if you, as I said before, are a member of the United States government, you have to be -- the government has to comply with section 508. So, one of the many services that we are offering related to this topic is assessment planning, compliance planning. How do you get section 508 compliant? We offer accessibility testing, where we have the different - - we have all of the different groups that are impacted by section 508, which mobility impairment, cognitive impairment, hearing or deafness, blindness and visual impairment, all of our testers have one of those categories, and we have testers that have multiple categories. For example, hearing loss and blindness, or a mobility impairment and blindness. So all of our testers have multiple -- fall into multiple categories of these impairments, or at least one of these impairments. We also have as part of the team people that do not have disabilities, just so that we can provide a more thorough understanding and testing environment. So if you're going to be testing for accessibility, we believe that the way to do it is not ask the person to turn off their monitor and pretend like they are blind. We think that you should hire somebody that is blind to do the accessibility testing. And we do a lot of education, a lot of training. We train the United States government. We train vendors that are working for the government and coming up with solutions, as well as companies that right now don't have to comply with section 508, but are trying to do it because they feel it's the right thing to do, to reach out to the 541,000,000 Americans that have some form of disability. We are encouraging corporations to -- that this makes a lot of -- it's a good return on investment. It makes good business sense to go ahead and make your products, services, websites, et cetera, accessible to a person not because there is legislation mandating it, but because you are opening your services, your business, up to a very large pool of people. So we do a lot of training on section 508 and IT accessibility. In our next, the next piece, engineering and reconsidering services. Since a lot of the work that we are doing is working with IT products, hardware and software, we also offer engineering and re-engineering services. We have a contract with National Education Training Group, which is an 8 billion dollar training company that has over 2000 online learning courses. And so their courses, because they are multimedia based and about 6 to 9 hours in length, what made them such good robust courses also made them pretty inaccessible. So they hired TecAccess to come in and help them look at their product and their engine, and try to come up with a way of re-engineering their product so they could be more accessible. And one of our partners, Steve Timmer, who is legally blind, he has macular degeneration, he is also a developer of AT products, he came in and worked with NetG to help them take a screen reader and build it into their engine. Now the online training courses that are also CD-ROM based, you can take that course without a traditional screen reader like a Jaws or Windows Eyes. It's just one way that you can provide accessibility.
We have done policy and legal review. As the government and the agencies, the vendors that are trying to sell to the government try to interpret what the -- what does section 508 mean. It's still a gray area. There are a lot of great organizations out there trying to determine what does it mean, the Access Board, the WC3 -- the W3C. I said that backwards. The Accessibility Forum. There is a lot of different groups out there trying to figure out what exactly are the guidelines. IBM has been involved in creating guidelines. Microsoft has created guidelines and the United States government, all the different agencies have set forward and they are creating guidelines. And, you know, until it gets real ironed out, legislation wise, it gets before the court systems, there is still a lot of grayness in guidelines. And so we help vendors and government agencies try to interpret what the policy is going to mean and help them with a legal review at the same time. The assistive technology and access interfaces. We are asking, through this legislation, we are asking vendors and the government to make a website, for example, that is accessible to a screen reader, which is a tool that someone that was blind would use. And a lot of these developers have never seen a screen reader; they don't know what it means. They are not sure what the assistive technology is and how the access interface would work, and so that is something that we provide consulting with and education on it at the same time. A lot of times, we will have a class with AT, where a person sits down and actually tries to use a screen reader, and we at the same time bring in some of our associates that have that specific disability and show examples of how they utilize this technology to get access for the website or the product or the software. Who are we? I've talked about this a little bit, but we are a very diverse company. We have people in our company, and you're going to meet a couple of those people later on in this presentation, but we have people who have blindness, who have hearing impairment, deafness, visual impairment, mobility impairments. cognitive impairments. We have CP, MS, we have all the different acronyms. We have brain injury, quadriplegia, paraplegic, we are just -- blindness, macular degeneration. We have -- currently we have about 40 associates, and we have a wide range of all types of disabilities. But we also have a really nice story to tell, based on who we are and the products and the services that we are offering. Getting to telework. First of all, just to speak for a minute about what is telework, also known as telecommuting, and what that means to TecAccess is we all work out of our home offices. We have, for example, I have a home office in Rockville, Virginia, and I have a computer, my phone lines and I communicate via e-mail, telephone. We have meetings, you know, all of the time. And we all work in separate locations and it has been a real success and we have had some real opportunities to overcome at the same time. We are going to stay with the word telework, because that seems to be the word that is being more frequently used, especially in regards to the freedom initiatives. That is one of the initiatives that President Bush has on his platform, which is he is encouraging the government to provide more telework. So we are going to use telework, but we are talking about telecommuting as well as the same thing. Why telework? Well, whenever you are dealing with employees that have disabilities, there is a ride range of accessibility issues. Some of them can be transportation issues. For example, some of our employees can't drive, due to blindness or mobility issues. And the transportation that is available to them sometimes is not reliable. It's sometimes very, very expensive. And there is just a whole host of reasons. But transportation is one of those issues. Another issue is the physical limitations. One of our employees has severe diabetes and he has -- he sustained a very bad back injury. So there are certain days when it's just really difficult for him to get into an office. But he can stay in his home office situation and be productive. We have some of our employees, because of their severe physical limitations, can be more productive if they don't have to figure out how to get to work, on the days when they are not really feeling well, or maybe their medicine is disagreeing with them, it allowing them to be more productive. And health limitations, sort of some of the same things as physical limitations in that sometimes we have health limitations that have -- somebody with a severe disability getting a cold, it can be more of an obstacle to them than somebody that didn't have a disability. There are all types of accessibility issues. Some of these issues can be overcome with telecommuting or telework. Before I go into the next slide, which is pros with telework, I'd like to introduce one of our staff members. He is a brilliant man that we are really, really proud to have as part of our team. His name is Sean Stapleford, and he is going to be interviewed by one of our managers, Jesse Evans.
>>Well, what about sharing with me some of the advantages of telecommuting. >>One of the big things is flexibility. I do not have to worry about weather. There could be twelve feet of snow outside, no problem. I do not have to travel. I do not have to worry about travel time. Also, I can arrange my schedule around when I am free. Or, I can work two hours in the morning, two hours in the evening if I want. Or, I can work six hours straight. Sometimes, depending on the type of work you are doing, you can only work on something for a half hour or and hour and it is hard to keep concentrating. You need to take a break from it. With telecommuting, you can do that. You can take a break. You can fit it into your own timeframe. If you get into a groove, you can just keep going along with it. It fits in very nicely with my lifestyle and the situation here at the Virginia Home. >>With that list of advantages, give me some disadvantages. >>One thing I guess I miss a little bit is actually getting out and meeting people, you know, face-to-face. In some ways it would be nice to actually get out in the community. I did actually work for a little while at VCU, but medical problems got in my way there. It was a very fixed schedule, working a four hour shift, you know, five to nine. I had to be there at five o'clock, I had to leave at nine o'clock. Everything was very fixed. I had transportation to deal with, other things. With this everything is a lot more flexible. Sometimes the structure is nice though, knowing for sure what hours you have, going out and meeting a lot of new people. When I was at VCU I met a lot of new people. A little less community interaction, I guess, is the downside.
>> Well, how has the TecAccess family culture helped you with your growth as a person and how you enjoy your job with TecAccess?
>> I think it's great. I mean, being a startup company, things are -- once you get into the development and organize it, different people filling different spaces, different needs, and knowing that you are doing something good, it's really helping people, knowing that you are accomplishing something every day of course and helping other people is real important. And it's not a very -- it's not very formal. You know, it's a little more casual than someplace. >> Okay. >> A lot of flexibility, which works real well for me. Sometimes your mind just doesn't want to work that way. Sometimes working like this, where you are evaluating things or making judgments, after a while you know your brain can get -- you lose focus after a while. >> Well, you still have a sense of family closeness with TecAccess as from working with a large company. >> Oh, yes. Give or take, it's -- everybody sort of knows each other. You always have somebody that you can go to, get in contact with. And everybody is just kind of like a family. It's not quite like family, but it's close as it ought to be. >> Okay. Do you have anything that you'd like to share personally about the company that you want me or anyone else to know that you accomplished or what you like about the company. >> Everybody, I -- I just love the opportunity to go out to work, actually, and do something that is helping people, something that really is important. I would never want a job that was -- that was make work, just doing something to try to help these poor handicapped people, get somebody here. You know. I'm actually doing something that, you know, whether I was disabled or not, I would be doing the same thing. It's not a handicapped job. >> Okay. I can relate to that. >> But I'm helping people who are handicapped and also helping people who are not, you know, helping businesses. They make their places accessible to people with disabilities. It's amazing some of the companies that we worked with, you know. We are making a difference with the federal government. That's kind of a big thing, you know? It's a big accomplishment there. >> Well, good. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. >> Well, thank you. That was Sean Stapleford and Jesse Evans, two employees that we are proud of. Going to the next slide, pros with telework? You can expand your candidate pool. As a matter of fact, we recently hired I believe about 12 new testers, due to business coming in, which is a real blessing to us. And we were able to expand our candidate pool, well, internationally. We have one gentleman who is a tester for us in India. We had resumes coming in from all over the world. It was wonderful and almost overwhelming to us. We hired testers in Texas and Kansas and California and northern Virginia and Washington, and I'm not even exactly sure at this point. Our testing manager, Tracy Butere could tell you. We have people all over the world. We have a senior tester who is blind, who is in Hawaii. So you can really expand your candidate pool, which has been just -- it was a wonderful opportunity for us, because accessibility, IT accessibility, it's an emerging market. So we were able to offer testing positions to people that not only had specific disabilities, and understood and knew their assistive technology, but they really understood where we were trying to go with the accessibility to support these corporations and the federal government at the same time. I talked about this before, but it bears repeating in that it will reduce accessibility issues. There are accessibility issues that come in so many forms. One that I don't have up here is on assistive technology. Assistive technology can really make a big difference between getting on the Internet or getting on the -- really being able to utilize your computer. And sometimes affordable is an issue, which is another reason why we like Steve Timmer, because they create AT that is affordable. Instead of paying $800 for a screen reader, you can purchase one from his company for $150. And that can make a difference between a person getting hired or not getting hired. So accessibility issues are just coming in a lot of different ways. Transportation I already talked about, in that if a person can't get to work because of unreliable transportation or costly, it's so expensive, or maybe they can't be transported, maybe it just doesn't make sense or they have to have this personal assistant with them. There are a lot of issues related to that, which make telecommuting such a good idea. Physical limitations. Again, if a person as Sean was referring to, about every 20 minutes he has to stop, adjust, and move around, and because of his physical limitations he starts getting unfocused. He just needs to move around, and I think that is something that all of us would benefit from, about ever 20 minutes, refocusing. But it really reduces physical limitations and helps us to address the physical limitations as they happen as well. And health limitations. We have a gentleman that works for us that has CP. When he first became a tester, he was on different medication that caused him to have severe heart palpitations. It was scary to him and to us, too, and we were able to work around his health limitations and work with him while he got his medication readjusted, to the point where Josh is one of our best testers now. So the telecommuting, once again, really will reduce some of the accessibility issue, and allow the employer to hire the best person for the job regardless of whether they have a disability. We hire based on abilities. And we feel that the testers that we have and the trainers that we have that have disabilities, they are already used to thinking out of the box, per se. And so they are some of the -- talk about somebody that could really understand a problem and figure out how can you do this when it's never been done before? That is who we are. And that's who our people are. Because they are already used to having to deal with those kinds of issues. Another benefit, and we talked about it a bit, assistive technology or AT, and it can be expensive. And so by accessibility -- by telework, you can have one set of assistive technology tools in your PC, set up exactly like you want it, and everything is set up in one place as opposed to having it in two different places sometimes. So it really has been beneficial to us. I'd like to introduce another employee, Ed Ziegler. Ed Ziegler has brain -- has sustained two brain injuries, and has severe diabetes, and Ed Ziegler is just an incredible person. He is the type of person that makes you feel good just to be in the room with him and he is very brilliant. And Eileen Brooks, who is our marketing sales director, who has been a huge blessing to TecAccess. We feel very fortunate to have both of these individuals with us. >> I'd like to ask you another question in regards to telecommuting. If you could share with us some of the obstacles that you've encountered as a telecommuter. >> Obstacles. The biggest obstacle that I have with telecommuting is having to mentally plan out when I'm going to do things. >> Okay. >> ED ZIEGLER: And having the will power to -- well, will I still have to work for however long to get this project done? >> Would you please share with us some of the benefits that you encounter as a telecommuter? >> ED ZIEGLER: Being able to schedule my work time around my disability or disabilities. I can, when I'm not feeling well for whatever reason, I can take that time and recover. I have the freedom to make my own schedule. And I can, for instance, some nights I can't sleep. I'll wake up 3 o'clock in the morning. I can go to work. I can come in here, sit down for a couple hours, very quiet, there is no distractions, I can get the job done. >> So flexibility is a key benefit -- >> ED ZIEGLER: Definitely. >> -- in telecommuting? >> ED ZIEGLER: Yes. >> Okay. Is there anything else you'd like to add? >> ED ZIEGLER: I think that one of the benefits that I get from working for TecAccess is I feel like I have an extended family here. We have Christmas parties together. We have -- we get together. >> Celebrate your birthdays? >> ED ZIEGLER: To celebrate my birthday and we do that with all the employees. Not everyone all at once, but we always have something going on. If I feel good, I can take part; or if I'm not feeling well, I don't have to worry about it. There isn't a demand to be there. >> So there is an understanding, an individual understanding? >> ED ZIEGLER: Yes. And I -- the whole concept of feeling like it's family is real important. You feel like you're a part of something bigger than just you. >> DEBRA RUH: Thank you. That was Ed Ziegler and Eileen Brooks. The next slide is cons or the obstacles with telework. It really is important that the individual be self-directed and be able to self supervise, because a lot of times this is -- you're on your own. It's more of a project-based situation. We don't make our employees work at 3 o'clock in the morning, but some of us have been known to do that. At some point, the way we run our business is, it's by project. You have a project and it's due at a certain time. And if an obstacle is going to happen that you cannot fulfill that deadline, then you talk with your manager and just refocus it. But it's very important to be self-directed. Loneliness, as I believe both Sean and Ed mentioned, you can get lonely being at your home all the time. Once again, I mentioned that I have a daughter with Downs Syndrome. And if I told her when she is old enough to work that she has to work in the office alone all day, it would be really hard for her, because she is a very social person. So loneliness can be a real issue that people have to consider. Communications issues. I think that is in every company, but we are very challenged by communications issues. You have to consider things, just like e-mail, that when you capitalize an e- mail, that you are shouting at somebody. You know, you have to over communicate, you have to be really, really careful that everyone knows what is going on and everyone is on the same page. So communications issues, it's more of an issue with telework than even in the regular office environment. Not feeling part of the team, you can feel cut off from the team with respect to the loneliness issue. You have to communicate and make sure everyone knows that they are a valuable part of the team. As we have expanded throughout the world now, that is going to be more of a challenge to us. One of our managers you met earlier, Jesse Evans, spends a lot of his time making sure that people feel part of the team by visiting our associates. He wants to go to Hawaii and India. We can't afford for him to do that. But soon we will get him on a plane to go to India. How do we overcome some of the issues? I have already addressed a little bit with over communication. Communication is so important: emails, weekly reports, status reports that are due to the managers, phone calls, checking in, having people visit when that is appropriate and when we can do that, as well as project management. We can be sure of the project. We know what the scopes are, we know what the deadlines are, the milestones. We are very, very strong project managers. We try to build in time so if our employees are going to have health limitations or physical limitations it does not impact our customers. Our customers might come to TecAccess because we tell a really good story. We are an I.T. company that hires people with disabilities and we are providing some very valuable services, but they will not stay with us if we do not provide a good quality product and good customer service. Communication and Project Management are huge keys to making this a success. Teamwork. Different people, Jesse, Sean, and Ed and I have talked about feeling like you are part of a family. It goes back to communication skills and really making people feel valued, by making them understand they are a critical and important part of the team. Also, we have to understand that not every personality will fit the telework profile. We have had people that were just so lonely. They got so depressed being by themselves. So we had to understand that telework, telecommuting is not the best solution for every single person. You have to be self-directed, you have to be very organized and you have to have a support system, a support system with TecAccess, but also a support system with your own family, your own assistant sometimes as well. So, we have had to learn the hard way that this does not work for every single person. We have had some failures. We have had, we feel, a lot more successes, but we have learned a lot as we have walked down this path. I wanted to take a minute and just give you some resources. There are some great resources out there if you are telecommuting. There is telecommutemagazine.com. AT&T has a really nice telework site. Gilgordon is a really nice telecommuting site that we have visited a lot, and tca.org.uk is an English site that has some really good information as well. The internet has a wealth of information about telecommuting. And do not forget, that the freedom initiative, under President Bush, is a big initiative, so you can go to a lot of the federal sites and see the different initiatives that they have going on in the United States government with telework, also. And that's the end of my presentation. Teri? >> TERI BLANKENSHIP: I would like to thank Illeen, Jesse, Sean and Ed. If you want to hear more from Ed and Sean, we will have additional video clips on the archive page. You'll receive that link tomorrow. We hope you enjoyed this webcast and that you'll join us in the live chat room. If your question is not answered today in the live chat, you can post your question on the discussion board which will be open all week, and the discussion link is off the webcast link as well. Thank you for participating. We will meet you in the live chat room. (End of session.)