Computer Training Helps Place Visually Impaired on Level Paying Field

Despite their diplomas, fortitude and skills, the adult students in Francis Daniels’ classroom are unemployed or hold minimum-wage jobs. One student, a married man from Glendale, has spent a dozen years typing addresses for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. A woman, a college graduate, earns $6.25 an hour as a telemarketer. Milton Mejia, a 38-year-old employee at Smith Emery Construction, supports his wife and four kids on his salary as a file clerk.

But that is about to change. Daniels, who runs the Career Services Learning Center at the Braille Institute in Los Angeles, teaches his blind and partially sighted students how to use technology that can help them find work or better-paying jobs.

“For years, technology was always leaving blind people five or six years behind,” Daniels said. Computer software and equipment adapted for the visually impaired were out of date or came with exorbitant price tags. The early word-processing programs developed for the blind were used by only blind people, making it impossible for them to compete for jobs that required knowledge of the most commonly used software.

“My life has already turned around in this class,” said Mejia, who has completed eight weeks of a 21-week free course at the institute, during which Smith Emery is paying his salary. “This technology really puts me at the same level of competence as a sighted person.”

Mejia, like several of his classmates, said he had never used a computer before coming to the Braille Institute.

Daniels said he didn’t have a computer background, either, before he accepted a job as a clerk at the institute in 1980. When he opened its Learning Center in 1983 to demonstrate what technology was available for the blind, he had little to show.

“Yes, we had a talking computer and a reading machine,” Daniels said. “But the computer ran programs that only blind people used, and the reading machine weighed 150 pounds, was the size of a desk and cost $29,800. Who could afford that?”

On a recent afternoon, Daniels and his eight students were fine-tuning their computer skills typing letters using Windows 95. Mejia and some of the other students with partial sight used a $600 program called Zoom Text to magnify the text and icons on their screens as much as 16 times.

After class ended, Daniels demonstrated how to use a program called JAWS, whose speech synthesizer allows blind people to hear the words on their screens. The computer lab also has a scanner with optical-character-recognition software. A blind student can place a magazine, book or letter on the scanner and hear its contents read aloud.

Daniels, 47, said that a decade ago, job training for the blind was negligible, since most blind people were shunted into jobs making handicrafts or working as radiologists or photo processors in darkrooms. “The attitude was, ‘Hey, the lights are off, a blind person can do this,’ ” he said.

New and less expensive technologies have radically changed the possibilities open to blind people.

As important as the technological advances, Daniels said, have been legal changes affecting the civil rights of blind people. He said passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990, prohibiting discrimination against qualified candidates with disabilities, has had a profound impact on the kinds of employment available.

“Today, the obstacle isn’t the technology,” Daniels said, “but the perception that blind people can’t do the job.”

Gali Kronenberg is a freelance writer and regular contributor to The Times. He can be reached at gali.kronenberg@latimes.com