Mike Hess has developed some sort of super power to speed read e-mails using his fingers and ears.
“Many blind and vision-impaired people can listen to e-mails at 300 words per minute,” said Hess, who’s been blind since birth. “It literally sounds like The Chipmunks. Or a teenage girl.”
His inner senses and wry sense of humor help him achieve things that we with sight would consider near impossible. His latest? Convincing Uber, the ride-sharing service, to offer blind or visually impaired job seekers a free round-trip ride to job interviews in the Denver area.
“I was a blind IT networking nerd throughout my career for 20 years. And I explained how I was able to do this,” said Hess, who founded the Blind Institute of Technology from his Lakewood home to help blind and visually impaired workers find tech jobs. “The proof is in the pudding. That’s really what has been opening up doors and what opened the door with Uber.”
But his mission goes well beyond free rides from Uber. He wants developers to build accessibility into their mobile apps, websites and other software. He wants companies to hire blind and visually impaired people. And he wants this to go national.
“When you think that one in five Americans are either motor-skills impaired or hearing impaired or vision impaired, that’s a huge swath of the community. Yet when I go to technology leadership and I ask them are you with your virtual landscape and virtual products, are you serving your consumers equally well? The answer is obviously no,” Hess said. “With less than 1 percent additional (development) effort, you’re able to tap into tens of millions of consumers. I always present this as a business case.”
The nation is full of people with disabilities — about one in five Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Government regulations and lawsuits have forced companies to be more considerate of those with disabilities. Netflix had to add captions to all its movies after a lawsuit.
But a disproportionate number of vision-impaired Americans are unemployed or underemployed. According to the US Census Bureau’s 2014 American Community Survey, about 40.4 percent of U.S. adults with a visual disability were employed, compared with 77.6 percent of those with no disability. And only 26.8 percent of the vision-impaired were employed full time.
The Blind Institute’s focus on tech jobs comes at a time when area companies are desperately seeking qualified tech workers. But beyond helping fill that need, the organization is opening the eyes of companies. Alan Cullop, chief information officer at DaVita Health Partners, said having visually impaired people on staff has reverberated to other parts of the business.
“If you think about what we do, we’re in healthcare so we have people with various degrees of physical issues and needs,” said Cullop, who has hired four Blind Institute recruits. “Having the opportunity to make sure our applications are accessible and friendly for the vision impaired and people with disabilities, that’s a wonderful thing for both our internal teammates but more importantly, our patients.”
Accessible design makes technology easier for everyone to use, said Howard Kramer, who teaches a course on universal design at the University Colorado.
“That is the philosophy of universal design. The features we build in make it usable for everyone,” Kramer said. “If I try to pinch the screen to enlarge or shrink it and it doesn’t work, is that an accessibility issue? I can still read it, but it’ll be frustrating to interact with that page.”
A popular example of universal design is the curb cut, which requires sidewalk corners to have a short ramp for people in wheelchairs. But the design also helps plenty of people without disabilities, from parents pushing baby strollers to bicyclists.
In technology, high-contrast design helps make mobile apps and websites easier for visually impaired people to see. It also makes it easier for everyone to see what’s on their smartphone screens when they step outside in the sun. Video captions let sports bar owners turn on multiple TVs without each one blasting the room.
While most developers are familiar with the need for responsive design — so a site morphs automatically to fit the screen of a laptop or smartphone — fewer are focused on accessibility, even though it’s less effort, Kramer said.
“I would say there’s a learning curve but once you know it, it just becomes easier,” he said. “It’s much easier than learning the skills and tools needed for responsive design.”
Several groups, such as the Wireless Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center, are pushing for the government and tech developers to improve the accessibility of mobile apps, websites and software. The organization created an App Factory for developers to tap the community and learn from people with disabilities. Companies are becoming more aware of the potential customers, said Helena Mitchell, principal investigator for the organization.
“A lot of companies are creating accessibility offices,” Mitchell said. “And it’s not because of regulations. But a lot of it is that people with disabilities make up a nice chunk of the marketplace and a lot of people with disabilities are early adopters.”
That would be Hess. He plays with new apps all the time. When Hess first installed Uber’s app on his iPhone a few years ago, it worked. Most mobile apps don’t work for him. But developers had apparently made Uber’s iOS app accessible so a visually impaired person could turn on an iPhone’s VoiceOver feature and listen to the phone read off Uber menus and commands.
Before Uber and Lyft arrived in Colorado in 2014, Hess used the bus or had to “beg, borrow and steal a ride. It was painful,” he said. Hess worked as a senior voice engineer at Level 3 Communications in Broomfield before leaving in 2013 to start the BIT.
“Even though Level 3 is 14 miles due north from here, it would take three buses and 90 minutes each way,” Hess said. “But I was a six-figure guy, so of course I’m going to get myself there. It was incumbent on me to get my butt to work, so literally I would leave here at 5:15 in the morning just so I could get to work by 7.”
Uber has partnered with the National Federation of the Blind and LightHouse for the Blind in San Francisco to get feedback on its apps and site. Uber also regularly has a company called AudioEye test its website for accessibility. AudioEye offers developers tools to make apps and sites accessible.
It didn’t take much to convince Uber to join BIT’s program. Hess contacted the Colorado office in January. The deal was announced in July.
“There’s a quote in (the announcement) that goes back to our company’s mission: Automobiles for everyone, everywhere,” Uber spokesman Dave Bauer said. “This falls under the everyone and everywhere.”
Hess is working with Uber to roll out the service nationwide next year. Blind or vision-impaired job seekers with technology skills should contact the Blind Institute at blindinstituteoftechnology.org to request Uber codes for the free round-trip rides.
“Everybody’s got a mobile device,” Hess said. “And the mobile technology industry has made it possible so a blind person can absolutely perform like their sighted peer.”
