2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers

Seminars@Hadley

Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers & How They Overcome Them

Presented by Dr. Adele Crudden Ms. B.J. Lejeune

Moderated by Billy Brookshire

May 28, 2010

Billy Brookshire I'd like to welcome you to the Seminars at Hadley. It is my great pleasure to introduce your two speakers today. Dr. Adele Crudden and Ms. B. J. Lejeune, both of Mississippi State University at the Rehab, Research and Training Center for Blindness and Low Vision. Adele is a research scientist within MSU and B.J. is a training coordinator. Adel is the one who has done the most research on the topic that we're going to talk about today and B.J. has trained just about everybody in the nation at this point.

So without further ado I'm going to get them get started talking to you about what research tells us about obstacles for blind job seekers and how they

Adele Crudden Good morning, thank you so very much for giving me this opportunity. Then I'll B.J. say hi as well before I get started.

B.J. Lejeune Good morning everybody, it's nice to see you here this morning.

Adele Crudden Okay, thank you so much. I think B.J. and I might both have a tendency to over prepare a little bit, I know I'm hoping we can get everything in in time. When we talk about obstacles for people who are blind, looking for employment I think one of the issues that we really need to think about is an issue that's affecting everyone and that's current economic situation and instabilities for the labor market now as far as job placement for anyone. Employment for people who are are blind or visually impaired did not go up a significant amount when the economy was doing really well.

It appears that unemployment is stabilizing. I think there is some disagreement on that but some people are saying, maybe they're just hoping that it is

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 2 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers stabilizing and maybe there is a tendency to assume that when the labor market goes down or is negative that there is a greater problem for people with disabilities but we don't really see that. None of the data really shows that. The data for unemployment for people with disabilities and people who are blind looks like it is staying pretty stable. So I guess we will hope that as the economy improves that this situation will be improving for us to but there's really reason to think that. If the labor market suddenly starts looking a lot better there is no reason to think that that's going to happen.

I think I wanted to start out talking about the barrier of transportation because research really confirms what we know from anecdotal information and that is that consumers and rehabilitation counselors both believe the transportation is one of the major barriers to employment. All of you know this yourself because you see how often people are talking about this when you run in to them, how often you get in a consumer group and it's a big topic of discussion. But we don't really have any substantive research confirming that if this barrier were eliminated that the employment rate would suddenly go up. We don't also really have any research regarding what the most effective interventions are for eliminating this barrier.

Obviously it's a very difficult thing to measure so the research more looks at things like perceptions. Research questions focus on things like how big a barrier do you think transportation is or on a rating scale from one to ten where would you put transportation? Or a researcher might ask people to list all the barriers to employment. Transportation is typically one of the major ones listed.

Now there are some systems, interventions in place right now across the country. Those typically with either the public transportation or paratransportation and they cross all disability groups. So we can look at some of those systems interventions and we can look at how many people are being served. By looking at the number of people that they serve we can kind of estimate what the impact of that intervention is. And we do have research that is more exploratory, that is it goes out and looks at people that seem to be doing a good job of addressing transportation and we can look at some of the ways that they are doing that and see if they're appropriate for replication in another environment.

When you talk to people about relocation or about transportation problems, relocation is typically mentioned as a big answer to transportation problems, they want people to move. Now we don't have any research that confirms how many people

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 4 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers have relocated to get jobs. We also don't know how many people would find a job if they did choose to relocate. We should not that there are lot of people, with and without disabilities who have to relocate for their jobs. Many of you may have relocated for your job. But relocation can be a lot more difficult for someone with a disability, particularly if you have multiple disabilities or if you have some kind of disability that requires you to have a pretty intricate support system.

You might need a support system not just for your employment activities but a lot of your activities of daily life and if you need to relocate it is sometimes very difficult to set up all the support systems in another environment. Even if your case is closed in one state, if you have to go to another state there system might be very different from your own so we don't have any real evidence on how effective that is or how difficult it is. Some people use self- employment as an option and there are some states that have really advocated using self-employment as an option for some people where transportation is huge. This is some of the very rural states and one of the ideas that has been pretty successful for some states has been using skilled tradespeople as mentors. They serve as mentors to teach other people their trade. Then these clients are set up in self-employment to sell their goods.

This might be of particular interest in a state like Texas because one of the trades that some of the states have used for this that is working pretty well is leather goods. Working in leather goods. The person would work with a skilled trades person, learn how to make leather goods and then market them on the Internet.

We really don't know the best way to address the transportation problem. The employers do recognize it as a barrier and they really suggest that the employers that have hired someone who is blind have taken an interest in it and they think that other employers should take an interest in it too. They really advocate, particularly when there are public transportation systems involved, that the employer intervene with the public transportation system. That they do something to try and get bus routes adjusted or doing whatever they can. That the employer usually has more clout because of their impact on the local economy in getting something done.

Consumers report that they need more help finding transport and they complain about rehab counselors not doing much to help them. This is sometimes mentioned by rehab counselors when they'll say well we helped the person by paying for their transportation for a defined period and then we leave

In an anecdotal way it has been reported that people who don't drive or who do not own cars sometimes are a little bit uninformed about how much it costs to own and operate and maintain an insure a car. So I checked on that and Triple A has a recent estimate that it is about $16 a day for the average vehicle owner. So you can just kind of use that as a rule of thumb about expenses.

Transportation problems can also involve O & M, so O & M assistance on a short-term basis can be very helpful. We need to make sure that when public transportation systems do exist that people know how to use them. Some people do elect to use paratransit systems because they feel it could be more convenient if they could have door to door service. Easter Seals recently did a teleconference on transportation issues and they included in it a check list of things to do to try and find transportation. Please remember that people who are on Medicaid can receive transportation services as a part of their benefit and some states actually have an employee who coordinates or navigates that transportation system for Medicaid recipients. So sometimes you can get clients to hook in if you can find out who that

Medicaid provider is, sometimes you can access them.

For example, if there is a Medicaid provider who is taking dialysis clients three times a week on a weekly schedule, sometimes you can partner with them. Those are just some examples of some of the things that people are doing with transportation but it is an unresolved issue and it is going to take a lot of time and effort to get that worked out. I'm going to pass this over now to B.J. for a bit.

B.J. Lejeune Thank you Adele, I appreciate that. Good morning everyone, it's really great to be with you this morning. I'm going to talk just very briefly about three areas, the first one being adjustment to vision loss and the impact on employment and I just want to say there isn't a whole lot of research in this area. We do have some research indicating that of course employer attitudes, public attitudes, even sometimes the vocational rehabilitation counselor's attitudes are considered to be a barrier when people who are blind and are now employed look back and talk about the barriers that they had.

They also consider themselves as having been a barrier sometimes and that's where we get into this adjustment/acceptance issue and I'm going to give a

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 8 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers blatant advertisement for Hadley if that's okay with you Billy, and that is the course on self-esteem and adjusting to blindness. That particular course does address some of these issues. We have seen in some of the research in the past that that discouragement is looked at as a barrier to employment and that discouragement sometimes come from just feeling like you just don't have what it takes to get out there and fight the fight kind of thing.

In academic circles we use a term called “self- advocacy” where you know that you have the ability to accomplish a task, that you have the determination and that you have the skill and the ability and that you're going to get it done. I think all people who are unemployed have difficulties sometimes and especially the longer the unemployment goes on. There is some research showing that people who have been unemployed for over a year it is much for difficult for them because of the discouragement and sometimes we forget that all people get discouraged and we may think it is just because of blindness.

There are some things that are unique in blindness and we do know that sometimes people struggle with self-esteem so that is one of the issues that is just something to take a look at. One of the things that Dean Tuttle in his book that is used for the Hadley course, he mentions other factors that can impact

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 9 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers self-esteem being things like age of onset, the severity or the suddenness of the vision and the impact on your lifestyle for persons who become visually impaired or blind later on in life.

I would like to go on through to another area which has gotten quite a bit of attention I think since about 1998 when Dr. Ruby Ryle's issued some articles and things based on some research she did on the use of braille and the impact on employment. She had two different studies she did. One had about 175 people who were blind and visually impaired in the study and of those the unemployment rate ran about 66%. That's what we see nationally, that's very consistent with the various aspects of unemployment that we know for persons who are blind and visually impaired.

She had another study where she looked at people who were congenitally blind, just those who were born blind, or born visually impaired, some vision. What their primary source of ready was, they went through school. This study has gotten quite a bit of attention because it showed a dramatic difference. There were 74 people in the study and they ranged in age from 18 to 55 and the percentage of unemployment among that group was quite a bit less. In the study that she had, she looked at the people who learned Braille as their primary source of accessing print – we do know access to print is a barrier to employment – that 44%

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 10 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers was the unemployment rate for that group as opposed to 77% of those that use the print as their primary medium that they learned growing up.

Educators have really taken this particular study and looked at it as the importance of Braille and as you know perhaps in the New Idea legislation there is some indication that people who are visually impaired, students who are visually impaired need to learn Braille unless there is an assessment saying that they shouldn't. That in part goes to some of the evidence from the study.

One other study that I just want to mention kind briefly and it's something that is in progress, has to do with contextual learning. One of the things we've seen in terms of learning various skills, it's one thing to learn how to cook bacon, fry and egg and have breakfast, but it's another to learn how to do that in a timely enough manner that you can catch the bus. So one of the emphasis we see at a lot of the rehab centers now and also in some of the individual training programs is learning in the context of how long it is going to take to do something, to prepare the skills that people need in order to be sharp and on the edge and ready for employment. So that kind of goes back to some of the adjustment to blindness skills that people need.

There's kind of three ways that this study, actually it's somewhat of a study and somewhat of a practice. A lot of what we have in the blindness field is more anecdotal and Gary Bowman and Sue Carter and Linda Jones in Texas had looked at three steps to doing this. The first one had to do with adapting behavior and learning skills. That would be just learning how to do various things like identification of money. You're not using any technology, you're not needing any particular devices, you're just learning a skill, so that would be an example of that.

Another would be adapting the environment is the second level you look at and that would be Braille labels on a copy machine or something like that and the third would be using assistive technology. Kind of looking at those three areas and skills that people develop in those three areas. Sometimes we just look at assistive technologies as the answer but sometimes it's a much easier fix. I'm going to put it back to Adele and look forward to hearing what she has to say.

Adele Crudden Thank you B.J. and I'm going to try and talk a little bit faster because I'm think I'll never get through all this. I'm going to talk next about attitudes. There have been several studies that found that consumers believed that employers and the general public have

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 12 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers negative attitudes about hiring people with disabilities and particularly against people with visual disabilities. And also that employers are unfamiliar with what people who are blind can do and how technology can be used.

Employers say they do know they need to address their own fears about blindness and vision loss. Employers that have hired people who are blind, when we talked to them later they admit that and they say that's true they did have fears about it and they want the rehab counselors to address this, they want help with that. They also want the counselors to help them get the consumers who are placed more socially integrated into the job.

Women and minorities believe that they have a double negative when they are seeking employment. There has been a study of women who are blind who found that they feel they are under-estimated in terms of their employment, but almost all of the research about women who are blind is very dated. There are a lot of changing dynamics in the labor market now with respect to the participation of women. So this is an area where we really need to a lot more research that is current. When you ask employers what challenges they face hiring people with disabilities, now this is not necessarily vision related disabilities

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 13 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers but they'll say that they just don't understand how somebody with a disability can effectively do their job.

The issue of attitudes of co-workers or supervisors is the least frequently cited challenge that they mentioned. But again, they admit that they have fears. They also admit that they have concerns about safety and insurance issues and worker's compensation. So we have to do a better job to educate employers about safety and insurance issues. Employers also say that they have concern about a consumer's ability to switch from one task to another and their efficiency in completing job tasks. Consumers have said the same thing that sometimes they're having to use assistive technology slows down their production and this creates an employment barrier for them. I just read a study the other day that found that when browsing web-sites sighted individuals can browse a web-site three times faster than a person who is visually impaired. That just gives you an example of how assistive technology is very helpful but it's not necessarily leveling the playing field.

Employers do recommend that rehab counselors use business advisory councils with employer membership to try and spread information. They are very big on “We don't know enough, we need more education”. But it's hard to get an employer to give

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 14 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers you the time to do that. There is a lot of debate regarding when consumers should disclose their vision impairment to an employer. If you ask employers they state that they want to know about it before the interview. They don't want to get surprised. However, we don't really know what the consequences would be if everybody did this and many consumers believe that if they let that be known up front that they are going to get screened out and not even get an interview.

In several studies were consumers have been asked their opinions of how to improve employer attitudes they have recommended a major public education campaign. And so there are those of us around here who are old enough to remember a big campaign called “Hire the Handicapped”, I don't know if some of the younger people remember that, but most of the younger people would be familiar with the big effort the government has put out to encourage people to quit smoking.

Currently there is a big national campaign going on entitled “Think Beyond the Label” and it's really designed to raise awareness about hiring people with disabilities and that it makes good business sense. There's a group called Health and Disability Advocates that is a national non-profit and they're doing this campaign in 40 states. Google “Think

Beyond the Label” or if you Google Health and Disability Advocates you can read about their campaign. They have a lot of information to share.

Consumers want employers to be more open about the idea of hiring someone who is blind and they're also asking for assistance with transportation from the employer. Many consumers want flexible schedules and this ties back to this transportation problem because if you have unreliable transportation then you need a flexible schedule to accommodate that.

Employers want rehab counselors to help educate consumers about business and the bottom line and what their individual businesses are doing. They want consumers to come in and be prepared and have a really good work ethic. Those that have hired someone who is visually impaired agree that the employer should assist the person who is blind in getting to know the people in their office and helping out with the social integration. There is a lot of information out there about what employers think and what they want and what they don't want.

Another barrier associated with employment is academic competence. Consumers, rehab counselors and employers have all agreed in various research projects that basic academic competence is very, very important for employment. Rehab

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 16 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers providers have identified lack of education in skills training as the most frequently encountered barrier. That's been the rehab counselor perspective.

There is a lot of concern that our children who are blind and visually impaired are spending so much time doing activities of daily living skills training in the school system that that is negatively impacting their academic achievement. This can lead to them being less well-prepared for work. In a recent study of transition aged youth, academic competence was the biggest factor associated with employment.

Just a side note to this, there is a lot of variability among the states about how to earn a high school diploma. They can range from a student with a disability being held to the exact same standards as every other student. They can require fewer credits, they can provide alternate course work. They can reduce performance standards, or there are many, many other variations. This all is determined by the particular state so that's something to keep in mind when someone comes in with a high school diploma. You can't believe that there is any kind of standard level of competence that that implies.

I was just reading something the other day about the high percentage and the increasing percentage of entering college students who have to do remedial

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 17 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers work. So this is a phenomena that is by no means restricted to our students who are blind, but we're going to need to pay a lot of attention to this because employed persons who are blind have higher educational levels than those with lower levels. So your educational level is associated with your likelihood of getting employment.

I just want to mention for a minute about assistive technology. Consumers, employers and rehab counselors all agree the delays in obtaining assistive technology have a very negative impact on employment. I couldn't find any research that documents a relationship between assistive technology and employment outcomes, so we're only operating on what people believe from their experience. The same way we know what we know about people's experience with transportation. But access to print and technology can be tied together in many settings because communication is becoming more and more based on technology rather than print.

However, having said that, there are still a lot of jobs where notes and hard copies are the norm. For example here in Mississippi many of the public records are still on hard copy and that can limit access to documents and consequently that can negatively affect somebody's ability to be employed in a city or county government office. Among transition

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 18 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers aged youth those who are close with jobs were much more likely to report using assistive technology than those who did not have jobs.

Interestingly, those employed and those unemployed both said they needed more assistive technology. That kind of goes hand in hand with employment preparation. Consumers and professionals both agree that people or visually impaired may get less information about what jobs are currently available and that might be tied to access to technology. Many believe this problem though starts even earlier with lack of adequate vocation information and career planning activities, so including career information and job placement efforts very early on is recommended by both consumers and professionals.

Work experience, employment during high school whether it's during the summer or whether it is part- time during the school year is a very good predictor of who is going to have a job after graduation. There are a lot of educational programs for youth with disabilities that use work-based learning where the student gets some kind of hands on experience in the employment sector. But please note that youth with visual impairments are much less likely to have this kind of experiences than youth with other disabilities.

Having worked since the visual impairment began in also associated with employment. Consumers have suggested that computer training skills have to begin at a very early age and that more vocational training opportunities have to be made available at a younger age. Rehab counselors note that the lack of employment related skills can be a real problem and they also want to provide training opportunities at an a very young age.

Let me just comment that Texas is really a standout state in this because of your great transition programs. Many, many states wish that they had such a program, it would be a lot of help. I'm going to turn this over to B.J. again and then if we have time I'm going to talk again about some issues regarding attitudes and self-determination and self-advocacy and also just some recommendations that clients and employers have made for rehabilitation counselors.

B.J. Lejeune Again everybody, this is B.J. Lejeune. I was going to talk a little bit about employment and aging. I kind of sense just from some of the comments that I've seen that this may not be as of as much interest as some of the other topics so I'll go through it kind of quickly. I just want to mention that the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that they are kind of shining the spotlight on older workers. Many people are finding

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 20 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers now that their Social Security Income and the cost of living is not sufficient and they are needing to go back and get some employment. So just in general, not necessarily for those with disabilities, but just persons in general we've seen a 101% increase in the last ten years of workers over 65 years of age. The statistic there was 59% for total employment. But for men over 65 the increase was 75% but for women it was a 147%, so we're seeing a large increase in women.

Keep in mind the baby boomers are just coming in and this is over the last 10 years so this does not include the baby boomers who are now going to be coming into the work force. Part-time employment was very much what people were looking for. Something that wouldn't impact too much with their benefits that they get from social security.

There is a project that we just completed here on persons aging with hearing and vision loss. In that particular study we found that about 13%, we had a little over 400 people in our sample, so about 13% which came out to about 36 people who responded to our surveys indicated that they were still employed. These are people who have a severe vision impairment, a severe hearing impairment and are over the age of 55.

One of the things that we found kind of interesting was that although many of them had employment, for those who were still employed, a lot of that employment was related somehow to rehabilitation or disability issues. For example there might have been somebody teaching sign language, there might have been somebody teaching braille, somebody might be working at a library for the blind. There seemed to be more rehabilitation/disability related employment in that group.

Although there were some exceptions to that. We had some focus groups that we also ran and in one of those groups we had a gentleman who was an engineer, he was in his sixties he had his own business doing custom engineering of certain kinds of equipment and things, so we still see there are some very high technical jobs out there. We also had a social worker who was a greeter at Wal-Mart. She said she always liked Wal-Mart and she enjoyed doing that and it was great.

The benefits that we see in terms of Social Security and so forth can be endangered if it's a full time job, so a lot of these employment positions were part-time. Adele, let me put it back to you.

Adele Crudden Okay, thank you B.J. Maybe I can talk a little slower now. A little bit about attitudes and self-determination and such. Research finds that consumers relieve believe in issues like good emotional health, perseverance, having an optimistic attitude, spirituality and things similar to that are all very positively associated with obtaining employment. Professionals working with persons with general disabilities have suggested that learning how to identify and request accommodations is a good method for helping people increase their self-advocacy. So learning self- advocacy skills and decision making skills are ways that you can help people increase some of those positive feelings. Try and help them feel as if they have more control over their own lives.

Also research shows that people with lower self- esteem tend to be unemployed at higher rates than people with high self-esteem so again you have this relationship between self-esteem and employment. We don't know which came first, the high self-esteem or the job but you can see how they would be related.

In a recent study of transition aged youth those who said they had greater control of decision-making were more likely to be employed. And youth with a high locus of control are more likely to be employed than youth without a high locus of control. So anything that

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 23 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers you can do to help people maintain their self-esteem, maintain a sense of control over their environment is going to be helpful.

Now the discouraged job seeker is a phenomena for everyone. We see a lot of self-help books about that. One of the comments someone made is you know when you're unemployment is 20% how do you keep people positive about finding a job. That's a huge issue. It's a hug issue for everyone. Some of the things that we're seeing indicate that it's not that people who are blind or visually impaired need different things, but they're going to need maybe more support to keep that up.

Rehabilitation counselors sometimes comment about a lack of motivation among their clients. That's a more ambiguous construct and it's really harder to nail down in terms of exactly what does that mean and how do you correct. But having peer mentors, professional mentors and role models and this means both in terms of people who are blind being mentors and professionals in similar professions being mentors whether they are blind or not, is a strategy that is frequently mentioned to promote employment and to promote some motivation. There seems to be some kind of expectation that interacting with people who are employed helps the person stay motivated

Sometimes the lack of motivation might stem from financial issues or government incentives. Well then if you call it a motivation problem that's really a misnomer, because that's really more of a practical decision that a person has made based on the financial impact of going to work on their family. What we need to do is assist our consumers in determining how much money they're going to need to make for it to be financially worth-while for the to go to work. And then, what jobs are available for them that will provide them that kind of income so that they can have a degree of financial security.

Insurance benefits are also going to be an issue, particularly if you have a person with a secondary health condition, for example diabetes, where the potential for them needing good insurance is going to be really high. So keep in mind that this financial decision that's really not a motivation issue, that's a practical decision that each one of us really needs to make about when we get up in the morning, getting up and going to work.

Some counselors report that clients' low expectations are an employment barrier. It's really interesting because then when you talk to clients they will say

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 25 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers that they believe that the rehabilitation counselors’ low expectations are an employment barrier. This is something we can kind of go back and forth and back and forth about. I guess we all just need to continue to remind ourselves that we need to have high expectations for ourselves and high expectations for clients and try and stay motivated in that regard.

Consumers who are blind and visually impaired who rate their relationship with their counselor has high are more likely to be employed than people who rate the relationship as low or average. There was a survey of employed people who were blind and 39% of them who received services believed that rehabilitation was helpful in obtaining a job. Only 39% thought that rehabilitation was helpful and only 10% reported that rehabilitation services assisted them in their ability to participate in an interview.

So keep in mind from a rehab counselor though, that you might have done the paperwork and all the eligibility requirements and paid for education and purchased equipment but sometimes clients don't associate that with helping them get a job because they're looking at getting a job as that placement aspect.

There are some systems problems in the rehabilitation process that some people believe

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 26 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers present barriers. For example, some people believe that counselor case loads are just way too high and so we all know that you serve an indefinite number of people and be effective. The intensity that you can deliver services is going to go down with the number of people you serve. Some say that there is an over emphasis on closures. Again, this is something that differs from state to state. You can go in one state and you'll have a large number of rehab counselors tell you this and you can go to another state and the rehab counselors tell you it's not a problem, so that's a systems issue.

Funding issues can also be a problem. And again it's amazing when we're all in this Federal system, how different the states can be. For example, some states provide technology based on financial aid or financial need and that there is a financial means test. Others have limits on funds that are available for something like job coaching. Speaking of job coaching using job coaches on a short-term basis to help consumers become familiar with both the vocational and the social issues surrounding a new job is one strategy that a lot of counselors have found very effective.

Examples that they have given me is a job coach can go in a tell a consumer if so-and-so's office is three times the size of everyone else's or the boss has a particular university's insignia and stuff all over the

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 27 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers office so they're obviously a big fan of this. Or these people go to lunch together every day or how you are dressing is just right or too formal or too casual compared to your colleagues. These are all things that after you've worked somewhere a while you would figure out, but if you had the assistance of the job coach to give you that kind of information right off the bat it would be really helpful.

There are some states that they don't let people use job coaches for things like that. Successful counselors recommend that consumers really get informed choice and that the counselors do everything possible to involve the client at every step of the way. There are states that have quite a bit of information up on web-sites and they provide copies of all kinds of documents in whatever medium is preferable to people. Some of them give CDs to take home or DVDs to take home that explain everything. So states that are successful, this is one of the strategies they are using. They really try and provide informed choice.

Rehab counselors are also reporting an increasing number of clients with multiple disabilities. So there is not a lot of evidence regarding whether supportive employment services are being used to any great degree with this population. People who have blindness and some other severe disability. If we look

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 28 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers at customized employment, that's gaining a lot of momentum in the field of developmental disabilities and it's moving beyond that now and really encompassing person's with psychiatric disabilities. Customized employment is being used a good bit with that group and person with severe multiple disabilities. I would love to see us do some more work in that area to see if people who are blind and have other disabilities or people who are blind if customized employment might be a good route to pursue with them.

I'm going to turn this back over to B.J. now and when B.J. finishes I think we're ready to take some questions.

B.J. Lejeune Well it's good to talk to everybody again. I've been kind of on the side here trying to answer some of the questions that you've been asking on the chat section and I'll try and get some of that information in here a little bit in a second. I do want to say there has been a real emphasis lately through those who are funding research looking at what is effective in terms of helping people get jobs. On looking at evidence- based practices and we were in a session earlier this week talking about how difficult that is when people are so different that we work with. Even looking at people who are blind and visually impaired there is

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 29 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers different levels of vision loss. There's different times of onset, there's different adjustment issues. There is different personalities, different educational background, different abilities to work with assistive technology and so sometimes it is extremely challenging to come up with evidence that says this specific thing will help people get jobs. Yet that's what we're all looking for, what is the magic formula, if we do this plus this plus this that will equal employment.

It's not that easy and yet we do know, as Adele has given us a lot of information about some of the research that is out there, that previous job experience helps. It's always easier to get a job if you have a job, which kind of difficult and challenging and then at the same time we do know that there are certain places who are actively trying to hire people. The Federal government has a new initiative out looking at trying to make more of a seamless entrance into the federal employment system for people with disabilities. Some state agencies, private agencies even who work in the area of blindness or low vision or disability are actively looking for qualified persons who do have disabilities. But at the same time finding the match is difficult because of some of the things that Adele has talked about earlier.

So we do want to open it up for questions and thank you so much for attention and the time that you've given us.

Caller What about the issue of aspects of job assistance centers such state job assistance location which do not necessarily have assistive technology at those locations?

B.J. Lejeune This is B.J. and I know that is an issue. There are people who go to the one-stop centers and then find there is no way they can search. But those centers are trying to make, as I understand it, more of an effort to make everything accessible, or at least have somebody there, but it has been an issue.

Bill Morgan Hello, I'm from Boise Idaho, Bill Morgan. We are actively trying to get people to come into the Business Enterprise Program here in Idaho and time after time, those that the counselors are sending us are so under-qualified and what we've had to do now is take locations, if people have left them for whatever reason, age or health or moving on to doing something else and meld them into our existing locations because we can't get people to come in and become independent vendors.

B.J. Lejeune This is B.J. again. We were on a conference call with some people discussing this the other day and one of the things that some of the states are doing is raising the entrance criteria for people to get into the BEP program. The biggest thing that they've done is they've instituted on-line training which requires people to have computer skills to get in and that kind puts in a certain level of ability. What they were saying was that translates back to the counselors who make the referrals to understand that they do need people who have a high level of skills. It's not the old Post Office selling candy bar system any more, it's gotten quite much more sophisticated and requires a much higher level of skill.

Adele Crudden And if I could just piggyback on that a little bit. If universities are having this huge problem with all these students coming in needing remedial work then what we're looking at is just a national phenomena as far as people not having the academic skills that we used to think they would have as college graduates. So we're facing this with a lot of people. It's not specific to BEP.

Billy Brookshire Any other questions folks, while we've got our speakers here?

Bill Morgan I have one other comment if I may. What generally I see happening is those that are employed, that are blind, the majority of those people are working for governmental entities or rehabilitation entities and I would guess, that's all it is a guess, that only somewhere around 20 to 25%, well not even that, we claim that there is about 30% if possible, 20 to 30% that are actually working. But I would bet only about 20% of those are working in private anything. The rest are all related to the blind industry or working for the government.

B.J. Lejeune This is a little bit like Jeopardy. I'm not sure if I'm just quicker on the button than Adele is, she may have something to add on this, but I was going to say I don't know any research that specifically says that Bill, although one of the things we are seeing is much more employment in the service areas, manufacturing and in-service, One of the areas are these call centers. A lot of them have made a lot of accommodations for persons with disabilities and are actively seeking people because they tend to stay in the areas. Some states have more of this than others.

For example Arizona has a high percentage of call centers and so they have a high rate of placements in those call centers. I don't know, Adele may have something she wants to add to that.

Adele Crudden B.J.'s right. I'm not aware of anything like that off the top of my head, but that is a very interesting question and I'm going to talk to William [Sansing] who does a lot of work with Census Bureau data and just see if there would be any way to tease that out of the Census Bureau information, so I'll follow up on that, thank you for that idea.

B.J. Lejeune This is B.J. again, in our study of persons aging with hearing and vision loss that was very much the case. But those were seniors with both hearing and vision loss so I'm not sure how that would work with the general population of people who are blind.

Bill Morgan Well the reason I came up with this is when you go to conventions, whether they are NFB or ACB and that seems to be the two major ones and you talk to people that are blind that are employed the majority of those people are employed, like I said, in the Business Enterprise Program or working for either the blindness agency or something related to that. Or

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 34 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers they are independent contractors working for several different entities to work in setting up computers, trouble-shooting, teaching but it all falls back to working with people that are blind or disabled. For the most part, I'm not saying all, but the most and on the side of call centers, if you don't have excellent skills, because it's nothing but time, time, time and they're on you, I can't imagine these places are going to give anybody that's blind or visually impaired, they want them up to standard with the rest of them because they're pushing everybody for every second they can get out of them, every single day.

Caller I just wonder, B.J. or Adele or anyone, if it seems like the call centers are coming back to this country. It seemed like I heard and read a lot about some of these call centers leaving the United States and going outside the country so that blind people in the US were not as able to get those kinds of jobs. Have you seen any return of those types of jobs?

Adele Crudden I hope you won't mind me saying this but I would refer you to Ed House in Arizona for further information about the call centers because they have a big network of consumers working with the call centers and it was my understanding that the call centers that were located in Arizona had sites in other states

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 35 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers where they were trying to also employ people who were blind and visually impaired and that was working quite well because some of these issues that people have mentioned in the public chat room above in our screen about the assistive technology working with the call center technology. Once they get that worked out the network works well. I don't know how hard hit they've been by the movement of some of these jobs. But talk to Ed House.

Caller Hello, this is (inaudible 0:54:56) for the Center for Visually Impaired here in Atlanta. We have a wonderful except here of how a call center has adapted and provided employment opportunities for people who are blind and visually impaired. It's the call center in Atlanta for AirTran Airways. They have hired in the last several years up to I think, 20 blind and low vision folks and they use both Magic or Jaws and from all I hear they are just as productive, certainly more reliable than all the other employees.

But they are held to the same performance standards and targets and they are able to do it and a lot of those people actually have gone through training on assistive technology here at the Center for the Visually Impaired.

Billy Brookshire Thank you for [Enicio] and all of you for your comments. I see now that our time is gone here and I know that you may have some other questions so I think I'll leave it on for another five minutes if that's okay. I also noticed all the conversations going on in the chat room. You guys are sharing some wonderful information and I appreciate that very much so any last question before we sign off.

Caller What was the, about the Braille skills necessity to obtain or also retain a job.

B.J. Lejeune Okay, I think the question had to do with the retention of jobs, if somebody loses their vision on the job perhaps. I do know that there was a study done in one of the Scandinavian countries about this a while back and they were saying that one of the things that happens if somebody loses their vision on the job and then goes away to a rehab center is that even if the job is held open for them that there often are some challenges that take place because everybody had a accommodated to your absence and when you come back then you may not have a job still. I mean there is a position open for you but everybody is used to working around that position.

But we also know that it's easier to return to a job that is with the same employer and in the same type of position, so some people will look back at previous employers. I'm not sure if that's exactly what you mean or if you mean just continuing in the same job if you were hired as a person who was blind. Of course that has to do with your work skills and your ability to get the job done.

One of the things that came up in some discussion that we were having a while back had to do with college students having time and a half to complete assignments. That's kind of a standard that we've used for a long time, but when you get out in the employment world you don't get time and a half. You have to be able to fit it into the same 8 hour day or work overtime or do things at home in order to get the job done and so getting up to speed is a big issue in some areas.

On the side there someone had asked about getting information about the medical transcriptionist programs that you can do from home – I don't have of that right available at my fingertips, but if you wanted to contact me or if you wanted to leave some contact information or maybe perhaps through Billy at Hadley I'd be glad to at least send you some information. I was talking to someone the other day who was employed. She was living in Arizona and

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 38 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers she was working out of Washington State for a company that was in North Dakota but she was doing it all from her home and I was surprised how spread out all the contracts were that she had.

She was getting information from hospitals in Alaska and in Montana, and it happened she worked for a particular company who helped broker out all these various things to transcriptionists. One of the things though is she had to be able turn-around the information that she received within a certain time period and that time period had to be usually less than three or four hours. So she had to be available all the time.

Billy Brookshire Okay folks I'm going to jump in, I notice our time is now gone. B.J. and Adele this was absolutely wonderful. For those of you here still with me, I want to remind you that all the seminars at Hadley, we record them all and we archive them on our web-site and they're available 24/7 so all you have to do is go back to the seminar page to find them.

Hadley courses, B.J. mentioned one Hadley course that would be good for you to check out in addition to follow up on some of the information in this webinar. That was the Self-Esteem and Adjustment with Blindness course. I'd also like to recommend the

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 39 of 42 2010-05-28-Obstacles for Blind Job Seekers finding employment course to look more into job seeking and information for job-seekers. Both great courses. So you want to expand your knowledge that's a good way to go.

I'd like to thank every one of you for participating with us today and as always we do indeed value your feedback. If you would, let us know what you thought of the seminar and suggest future seminar topics and you can do that by sending an e-mail to [email protected]. I want to give Adele and B.J. and chance to say good bye so any last words from you guys?

Adele Crudden Hi, I just want to say thank you to all of you who were so good about participating in our research projects because we do come knocking on doors sometimes to ask your agencies or ask you to participate in research projects and you know, I'm not the one out there doing this work. I'm just collecting information about what other people are doing and trying to put out there so that we can all know what we're doing out here. But you all are the ones out doing the work and I so much appreciate it when you take the time to participate in our projects. Thank you so much.

B.J. Lejeune This is B.J., we do thank you coming, particularly since the topic was research and sometimes that chases people away instead of drawing them in. We've tried not to just list out a bunch of statistics to you because that would be kind of a snoozer and we were talking just briefly beforehand we wanted come up with something jazzy to keep your attention and I'm not sure that we needed any jazzy, this was obviously a group that was very interested in this topic and it's something that we continue to look at and we appreciate very much your interest and you time and the discussions that we've had along the side.

Billy Brookshire Thanks again B.J., thanks again Adele. You guys did an exceptional job and for all the rest of you for coming and for listing your comments so freely in the chat room. Did want to cover one other thing and that's those of you who want CE hours just some quick information here.

If you want CE hours you're going to need to do a separate registration and payment process. You can find the link to do that on the section called “Earn Continuing Education Hours” on the seminar page which is www.hadley.edu/seminar they will tell you also how to log into the quiz. When a seminar is past

It's a link off Hadley's web-site. You need to allow about 48 hours for us to archive recordings but it's usually done pretty much after that folks and it won't affect your registration for CE hours process. Today, those of you who want to take the quiz to get the CE hours, the quiz is open approximately 15 minutes after this seminar is finished. You'll get two tries per registration to achieve a passing grade of 70% or more. If you fail it twice, unfortunately folks you'll have to re-register and pay again. You have exactly seven days from the first failed attempt to try again and once pass a certificate will be issued electronically to you.

The last thing is if you ever have technical problems be sure to contact our help desk at Hadley.edu and for general inquires about courses and other things contact Student Services at Hadley.edu. It's been a pleasure folks, have a great day.

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