[3610] in comp.os.os2.announce archive
PR: IBM Demonstrates New Technology to Help Disabled
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Timothy Sipples)
Sat Nov 29 18:58:04 1997
To: os2ann.DISCUSS@bloom-picayune.MIT.EDU
Date: 29 Nov 1997 18:05:00 -0400
From: tsipple@us.ibm.com (Timothy Sipples)
Reply-To: tsipple@us.ibm.com (Timothy Sipples)
Reply-to: tsipple@us.ibm.com (Timothy Sipples)
[Followups directed to comp.os.os2.misc]
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Additional announcement relating to access technologies...
PRESS RELEASE: IBM DEMONSTRATES NEW TECHNOLOGY TO HELP DISABLED
WORKERS
National Disabilities Awareness Month
MINNEAPOLIS, October 23, 1997 . . . In recognition of National
Disabilities Awareness Month, IBM today showed off new and evolving products
and technologies to help disabled American workers keep pace in the
workplace. The company demonstrated the products here at the Closing The Gap
conference, expected to draw 2,000 people who are disabled, occupational
therapists, representatives of business and government, and product
designers.
IBM highlighted three low-cost software packages from its Independence Series
that help workers with disabilities make full use of the power of computing.
ViaVoice* recognizes human speech and allows people with limited mobility to
dictate information to the computer, rather than type it. SpeechViewer III*
translates speech into visual patterns to help people with hearing
impairments learn to speak. And, ScreenReader/2* 'speaks' the information on
the computer screen with a synthesized computer voice to help visually
impaired people use computers.
IBM also demonstrated prototype software that promises to help computer users
who are disabled make better use of popular new Internet technologies,
including insurance, banking and other business applications used in evolving
corporate networks.
Traditionally, when new computer technology sweeps American workplaces,
disabled workers are left behind until product developers can catch up and
build adaptive solutions. For example, when computers evolved from text to
graphics, it took half a decade before screen readers that could read those
graphics to blind workers reached the marketplace.
"We don't want this to happen again," said Dennis O'Brien, product manager
for IBM's Special Needs Systems. "That's why we're working so hard to make
the emerging Internet environment accessible."
While an estimated 800,000 new jobs were created for workers with
disabilities nationwide between 1991 and 1994, according to the President's
Committee on the Employment of People With Disabilities, still only one-third
of the country's disabled population is employed. O'Brien points to studies
that show the average cost of accommodating a disabled person in the work
force is a very modest $200.
"That investment," he said, "is quickly recovered with the productivity and
skills people with disabilities bring to their jobs." More American
companies, O'Brien said, should discover that they make better decisions and
build better products when their employees represent a diverse mix of
backgrounds, ideas and points of view.
IBM has made the hiring of people with disabilities one of the objectives of
its diversity program and actively recruits people with special needs. Many
of those employees give input to IBM's product designers about the kinds of
devices they need to function fully in the marketplace. IBM also solicits
product input from government representatives and from non-profit groups
serving the disabled.
"It used to be a moral imperative to hire people who are disabled," O'Brien
said, "but now it's a business imperative."
More information on IBM Special Needs Systems group can be found on the Web
at http://www.ibm.com/sns.
* Indicates trademark or registered trademark of International Business
Machines Corporation.
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