Employing people who are blind begins with breaking down barriers and challenging the status quo. Blind adults in the United States face a 70% non-employment rate. Fortunately, continual advances in computer and assistive technologies create an opportunity to address unemployment in the blind community. Beyond Vision believes in using technology as a tool for empowerment and independence. Coupled with the proper training and support, these assistive devices enable us to level the workplace playing field for blind adults.

Accommodations in the Beyond Vision workplace:

Accommodations are adjustments to the work environment or an individual’s work situation that enable our employees with disabilities to perform work duties as well as (but not always in the same way) as our sighted counterparts. There are many examples of low vision assistive technologies and accommodations used at Beyond Vision, they include:

• Large print, tactile or talking weighing scales, micrometers or other measuring devices.
• Glare Reduction or adjustable lighting
• Tactile aisles and walkways
• Computers adapted with screen-reading, screen magnification, and/or optical character recognition (OCR) software. This enables text on computers to be listened to audibly or displayed real-time by braille refreshing displays.
• 3D printing

Accessibility can be found everywhere at Beyond Vision. It is our primary tool to create employment opportunities for people who are blind. The business unit where computer technology has made the largest impact on employment growth and job accessibility is our recently created Customer Care Center. Here we use computer screen reading software called JAWS (Job Access With Speech).  JAWS provides speech and braille output for the most popular computer applications so our agents can operate computers similarly to an individual with sight. To learn more about how we utilize this state of the art technology in our Customer Care Center, watch our video.

We are fortunate to have access to these life-changing accessible devices. We are also very thankful to our many donors who so generously give to Beyond Vision. It is donors like you who make it possible for people who are blind to obtain  gainful employment utilizing these technologies.