This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
LIA STONE: For tonight's purposes, the most important thing is National Employment Committee co-chair. I love, love, love helping people find the jobs that they want, find the jobs that make them happy, that make them fulfilled, that pay the bills. And as evidenced by my passion for helping people get jobs, I have many of them.
So I will say, I am normal -- I am a therapist in a telehealth agency, and I work with kids and teens, so I can be a little goofy on Zoom in presenting. So I'm going to try to keep that in check, but if I am corny, it is not my fault; it is the children. So I am going to keep it moving and introduce our panelists for the evening. Today's topic is all about remote work, and we have three panelists tonight, who are all doing remote work in very different settings. Remote work existed before the pandemic. It obviously exploded since March of 2020. That's how long I've been working remotely.
But is remote work all its cracked up to be? Is it easy to get? Is it easy to do? Can I just get a remote job, and then go slack off and get my nails done in the middle of the day? All of those questions could be answered and more. So the way that it's going to work, I'm going to announce our panelists, and then, each of our panelists are going to have ten minutes to talk about themselves and their work and their background.
And then, we are going to have time for questions at the end. Nikki, did you want folks to post questions in the chat? Do we have chat function enabled? I actually didn't check.
NIKKI: No. That's a great question. We actually do have the chat function enabled. Unless you have a burning question, I would say let's hold your questions until the end, but if it's like oh, my gosh, I've got to get this out, like just go ahead and drop it in the chat and again, we may have time in the end to also open up the floor for folks to come up and ask their questions.
LIA: I apologize if I mispronounce anybody's name, a blanket apology up front. We've got Danara from Kansas, and we've got Brandi from North Carolina, and we've got Michael Forzano from New York. So I'm going to turn it over now to Danara to talk about her work as a contract closeout specialist for the Air Force.
DANARA: Not closeout.
LIA: My bad. I read a word that wasn't there.
DANARA: I'm Danara, Nary. I also want to say I might be goofy, but I don't work with kids. I work with federal government employees who are also goofy.
But I work as an agency organizational program coordinator, and I also work as a contracting specialist for the United States Air Force. I started that job in 2020. It did not start as a remote job, nor did it start as a telework job, but COVID hit. So just to give you guys history on how I got the job and my journey. I finished my master’s, and I was searching for a job, but I couldn't find a job. I was interviewing and nothing was happening, so I started reaching out to my visually impaired friends that I had on my Facebook page, and somebody told me about Envision in Wichita.
And so I was like I mean, I don't really want to work in a factory making $9 an hour with a master's, but sometimes, you've got to sacrifice.
So I ended up moving, they paid for the move, I did all of that, and about a year and a half in, I started getting a little frustrated, because I'm like bro! And I started doing some volunteer opportunities, because Envision is an NIB agency working under the Ability One program, so I was volunteering for the camps with the kids and doing different things, meeting with different people.
And just leveraging what I had, you know. I stayed in the faces of the CEO and the VPs and all of that just to leverage hey, see me! Listen! Whatever you need, I'm here to help! I'm not being prideful in saying I'm not going to do anything or having, you know, that not-humble attitude like I'm sick of this place.
But just making myself known a little bit around there, and I ended up getting into the NIB business management training program, and I was the first person in a factory or what they called the Direct Labor Position actually to get into the NIB's Business Management Program.
So in that program, you go to George Mason University. I think we went five or six times for five days each time, and we got an honorary business management certificate. I guess I should tell you guys all that stuff, I got a whole ten minutes on E Street, so we are good!
I added that certificate to some of my stuff, but in that, I had to actually get some more administrative roles at Envision, which transitioned me into working in development at Envision.
And the CEO informed me about a position at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and me asking him how much they would pay and him saying almost triple of what he paid me. So I said okay, period! I wanted to know if it was a contract. Would I be working under Ability One contract? Or would I be working directly for the Department of Defense Air Force?
And he said that I would be working directly for them. I ended up taking the position, and it was all love, okay? Because I came in with a master. So you guys, I have a master's in leadership with a concentration in higher education. I have a bachelor's in psychology, associate's in child development, and an honorary certificate in business management. I was able to come in as a higher level than they thought I was.
As the song said, okay, let me get that money! So that was exciting, but when I moved to Ohio, March 10th of 2020 and COVID hit. So they shut everything down on the 12th. My first day of work was supposed to be the 13th. So I moved in complete insanity, but it worked to where I was able to still get the job. We were going in a few times a week, like maybe twice a week. For a few months, we weren't going in at all, because they were trying to figure it out.
Because the government was not ready for a full transition into telework. So we were all at home. They were figuring it out. Of course, they had to figure out JAWS and all of those things as well so that took a little bit of extra time on top of time. But eventually, everything got in line. We were still only doing a few days a week, and then, they said that we could go remote.
So this year, I finally went remote and was able to -- after working from home in Ohio, which I moved for nothing y'all! Because I could have been staying where I was the whole time! But after working from home in Ohio, in a partial telework environment, it only ended up being once a week, I was told that I could apply for a remote package. I applied for the remote package. I got it.
And I moved back to Kansas because the cost of living here is love, okay? You can't beat it with a stick. I just visited Maryland. Shout-out to y'all, but it's expensive out there! (Laughs) The cost of living in Wichita is amazing. And so I ended up taking my remote package and moving back to Wichita, and I feel like our moderator threw shade, because there has been a time or two where I've gotten my nails done on the clock.
So there is that. I love my job. It's pretty much -- well, it's two different things. So some acquisition in there. So I actually do cradle to grave contracts. So when somebody needs to buy something, I'm doing the research, I'm finding the contractors, we're competing, just depending on what we're doing. Sometimes, it may be what we call a sole-source, and sometimes, it may be where we have to compete the things for the contractors to get the buys or whatever.
And then, I'm also -- I'm an organizational coordinator. I manage people who have the government purchase cards. I manage those accounts; those are people who want to do government contracting efficiently so they'll pay. And there are multiple different thresholds and stuff like that that they'll pay with government purchase cards. They be getting on my nerves! (Laughs) But I love my job.
And I really am surprised at where I am and I'm grateful for the path that took me to get here. I'm grateful for the CEO at Envision and what he saw in me and his belief in me to say, the wording was, they're looking for some people who are high-potential and blind or visually impaired. So for him to see me and to believe that I had high potential is amazing. And so he really kind of -- him and a few other people really moved me in a position to be where I am. So here I am, four years later, GS-12, step 3. Making honestly almost 40,000 dollars more than what I was making when I started working for the federal government and that's only four years later.
So I'm super grateful. I don't know what else I'm supposed to say, so I'm going to call it done unless our lovely moderator -- is there anything --
LIA: It is entirely up to you! You still have a couple of minutes left, if you want to use them, but if not, no worries, because there will be questions at the end.
DANARA: Okay. Before I go on mute, I just want to shout-out. Somebody came in here with the name Honey Smacks. Someone vote for that name, okay?
NIKKI: Absolutely.
LIA: All right. Thank you very much and no shade at all in a previous life when I had a salaried job that was remote, I had certainly from time to time gotten my nails done.
DANARA: Right, because what? There's times!
LIA: All my remote work now is contract, so that's why we're having this call tonight. There's so many misconceptions, all of remote work is not created equal. But thank you again. And I just really want to highlight before we move on to our next panelist.
Nobody should have to take a job that is paying 9 dollars an hour in this decade, with any level of education, right? We all deserve a living wage, a minimum standard of living, but I really want to highlight just how kind of phenomenal it is that you started at a wage that should be frankly criminal and have worked your way up in a really short amount of time to a salary that does provide a living wage.
And so I just want to highlight that, because it's very tempting to pass on jobs that don't pay us what we're worth, but sometimes, we have to swallow our pride, and it doesn't always mean you're going to be stuck at minimum wage forever and ever. So our next speaker is Brandi in North Carolina.
BRANDI: Hi! Can you hear me?
LIA: Yes, we can hear you.
BRANDI: So I'm Brandi Major. I live in North Carolina. I'm originally from Florida and I work remotely as a customer service professional for Lighthouse Works, which is out of Orlando, Florida. I've been working remotely for two years as of August 1st of this year. So like I said before, I'm originally from Florida. So I started looking for work maybe, like, at 25, 26, and I couldn't find anything, because I lived in a small town. There was like no, paratransit there.
I tried getting services with the blind in Florida and they wasn't helping at all. They had sent a job coach to my house, and I seen her, she came and got my resume and that was it. I hadn't heard from her or anything. So I wanted a family and stuff, so I didn't want to continue getting Social Security; I wanted to do something. So Danara actually encouraged me to apply for a job in North Carolina and relocate.
So I took a chance. I worked at that job for three years, starting in 2019 as a sew-er at the Industries of the Blind and like Danara stated, started at 9 dollars.
They started me at 8 dollars so I figured I didn't have much to lose. My mom was encouraging me to do so. Oh, goodness, I lost my train of thought. She encouraged me, if I didn't like it, I could move back home. I'm not a quitter. I just stuck with it for three years. So I suffered an injury in 2022 going to work getting on paratransit, falling and slipping on ice. So I was out of work for like a few months.
So when I decided to go back to work, I was like I don't want to do this anymore because I was bored with the job, and I was kind of traumatized like going outside. At this point, it was the springtime. So I had applied maybe three times in the course of a year and a half to Lighthouse Works. They finally called me in July of 2022. And they wanted me to start like the following week. So I had to tell my job you know, I had to put in my two weeks' notice. But it really was like a few days' notice.
I started working at Lighthouse Works, August 1st of 2022. I started as a dining representative for Universal in Orlando. Customers would call and make dining reservations at the different restaurants at City Walk. I did that for about two months. And then, there was another campaign that they switched me to called the Assistance Fund. It helps underinsured people pay for medication that have rare diseases.
So I did that for a good six months. And then, they switched me over to the Department of Children and Families, which helps people in Florida with public assistance, like Medicaid and cash assistance and food assistance.
So I did that for a while. And then, they switched me back to the Assistance Fund Campaign again in the fall. And so I was doing that again. And then, you know, it was like a cycle. Then they switched me back to the Department of Children and Families and that's the campaign that I'm currently working on. Still helping customers get medical assistance, food assistance and cash assistance while actually attending school.
So I am attending college for the first time. I'm going on two years now; I'm getting my associate's degree in psychology. I'm halfway there! But I did want to transfer into getting my bachelor's. I want to get my degree in psychology, maybe a minor in communications.
I'm not sure exactly what I want to do with it, but I do want to help others, do some kind of help.
And that's it. I don't have ten minutes! (Laughs)
LIA: Classic telework thing to happen. I did realize my cat muted Zoom. So no worries! Ten minutes is the ceiling, not the minimum requirement. So you are totally fine. So don't worry, because there will be questions for you at the end but thank you so much.
And now, we will move on to our last panelist, who in addition to his actual job is a board member of the Computer Science Division and a board member from the New York City chapter of the National Federation of the Blind of New York, Mike Forzano.
MICHAEL: Thanks, Lia. My name is Mike Forzano, and I work as a senior software engineer at Amazon on the Worldwide Stores Accessibility Team, and I'll explain a little bit more about what I do in that role later on. But some background on how I got here.
So I've always been really interested in computers, and I've always been a tech guy, and when I was in middle school really, and I'm 33 so this would have been early 2000s, I was really into playing audio games, some of the early computer games for blind people.
And not only was I interested in playing them, but I really wanted to learn how to make games. So I actually at the time just reached out to some hobbyists, blind game developers online and became friends with them and learned a lot from them, started contributing to some different games.
I taught myself a lot and in that way, got into programming, and did that all throughout high school. And when it came time to go to college, I remember I was considering either computer science or studying to be a lawyer perhaps. And ultimately, I went with computer science, because as I was applying to some of the schools, I learned that it was easier to get into engineering schools from the outside, from the beginning, as opposed to trying to transfer to an engineering school later on. So I went to Binghamton University in New York, I went in as a computer science major.
And during that time, I also started RS Games along with a couple of my friends. Some might be familiar. It is an online game platform for board games, card games and dice games. It's at RSgames.org. Still around today. Still played by people all across the blind community. All the games are free. I started that in 2009.
And during my college years, I was really adding lots of different games to it and getting a lot of experience that way in terms of how to actually code something that people were really using. Lofts of people were really using. Way more people than I could have imagined, because there really wasn't anything of its kind before RS Games, an online platform where people could play with their friends who were blind or visually impaired or sighted.
We had a web client that sighted people could use. It wasn't a great experience, because you were just clicking buttons and reading text, but people could do it. So in my junior year of college, I started looking at internships and in retrospect, probably should have taken it a little bit more seriously. In today's world of the tech industry, I would say you need to apply to like 20 plus companies. I applied to three I think, and I think one of them, I didn't hear back for a long time, but eventually heard back from.
The first actual tech interview I had was Facebook and really failed that pretty epically. And then the second one was Amazon, and Amazon at the time was interviewing people on campus in person, and I was encouraged to apply, so some Amazon engineers came to do the interviews. I didn't notify them in advance that I was blind.
I walked in there and explained that I was blind and asked if I could use my laptop to do the coding because typically, that is done on a whiteboard. At least it was. Nowadays, it's mostly virtual, but back then, it was you had to go write on a whiteboard so they could make sure that you weren't using a compiler or anything like that that was helping you to write the code. They wanted to see your quote/unquote raw coding ability without any kind of help from the computer.
So they said sure, I could use my laptop. They watched me code. Did a two-hour interview, whatever it was and a couple of weeks later, I heard back that I had been accepted for an internship in Seattle. That summer after my junior year, I went out to Seattle for the summer. I was on the textbook rentals team as they were launching -- Amazon probably still has a program where you can rent textbooks, if you're a college student, rent actual printed textbooks and I helped launch that. I helped write the code that would send out the reminder e-mails to people when it was time to return the textbooks.
So that was a lot of fun. And really kind of had to work my own way. I didn't know anything about accommodations, anything like that. I basically called my manager the day before when I got his info and told him I was blind and installed my screen reader. I was using NVDA and still do for the most part. I use JAWS for office stuff, but mostly I'm using NVDA.
And it worked out because at the end of the ten weeks, they told me I had an offer to come back to work there full-time in Seattle.
So I went back, did my senior year in college, graduated and then moved out to Seattle and I lived there for seven years. It was a great experience.
Really is nothing like moving to a new city right out of college, not knowing anyone, and having to sort of find your way and make friends and all of that. It was when I got really involved in the NFB, when I went out there to Seattle. And that's how it was for seven years. And then, March, 2020, hit and we all went remote. By that time, I was really looking for a way to move back to New York. I really enjoyed my job. I didn't want to switch to a team in New York. I wanted to keep working on accessibility.
I started out on the Amazon trade-in program, worked there for three years and transferred to accessibility as they were building that program up. And yeah, by that point, I was looking for a way to move and the pandemic hit, we all went remote immediately and I went back to New York to stay with my mother during the shutdown. Ended up buying a house and was able to get permission to work remote and that has been the case since. And remote has been really great for me.
I credit it with helping me to advance in my career for a variety of reasons. I got promoted this year to senior software engineer and pros and cons, but I really enjoy it. I guess some of the -- let me talk first more about what I do. So, like I said, I'm on the accessibility team for worldwide stores, which is the Amazon.com site and the mobile app.
I don't work on the site or the mobile app. I'm not the person who fixes accessibility issues, but I work on automated accessibility testing software, so it's the software that teams at Amazon who work on the website to use to test their pages for accessibility. So it will run an automated scan. It will tell them here's where your issues are, here's how you fix them. It doesn't detect all issues. Anybody who works in accessibility, you know that manual testing is still a requirement.
But this is meant to catch a lot of the issues, make developers' lives easier, and most importantly, catch issues before they can reach customers and impact them. Should I talk some more about the remote work or stop here?
LIA: If you want to keep going, you've got about another minute, but I'm definitely going to ask you questions about remote work so it's up to you.
MICHAEL: Okay. I'll stop here then.
LIA: Cool. All right. Thank you, all. And I'm making a mental note to categorize and catalog all of my accessibility grievances with Amazon for the next time I see you in person.
MICHAEL: I can definitely get them to the right people. I can help with that.
LIA: So we're going to move into questions now, and I am sure seeing how many folks we have watching, I'm sure we have a lot of folks who have questions of their own, but I'm going to start. So this is a question that I would like everybody to answer in whatever order that makes sense.
Since the pandemic, I'm sure we've all seen at least one article, if not a dozen, talking about how wonderful and magical and playing field-leveling remote work has been for workers with any kind of disability. And the tone of a lot of these is that it's kind of a miracle for disabled people and that it will solve the employment issues that we have in just about every industry.
But, as all people who have been working remotely for a couple of years, I think we know the reality is a little bit different than that, than how it is portrayed and how it's pushed out. So I'm curious. I would like each of you to share what you feel like the biggest challenge you deal with is in remote work.
DANARA: I guess I'll go. This is Danara. I think the biggest challenge for me is that I'm an extrovert. I am definitely a people person. And so being at home all the time and not having a coworker to bounce things off of or walk over to their office or, you know, some of those things that you would get in a work environment, in a brick-and-mortar building where your coworkers are; I don't have that social stuff.
And I think -- I have a team that I'm not very fond of, but I think that my team would probably work better together in person than we do just like via Teams with everybody being spread abroad or whatever. So I think just not having that human contact, not having that person to bounce things off of, to walk over and have a chat with or grab lunch with and those types of things. That would be one of my major challenges, because you only asked for one. (Laughs)
LIA: Yes, I appreciate that. But that is an important one! Brandi or Mike?
BRANDI: I'll answer. So this is Brandi. I guess the same thing that Danara said, about not communicating with your coworkers. For me, since I'm constantly on the phone, I don't really get to chitchat or communicate with my coworkers as often. And my job has recently gone through some changes, so we don't really get a lot of team meetings to sit and get to know each other. So that is one thing, one challenge, and I do talk to customers all day and some of them aren't nice, you know.
They're upset, because they want their assistance. So it's not always -- not every call is a pleasant one. So communicating and having human interaction with my coworkers. That is a challenge working remotely.
MICHAEL: I can go. So I think one of the challenges that's always top of mind for me. So since the -- during the pandemic, everyone was remote. But especially in the tech industry and probably other industries, as well, they've started calling people back to the office, at least three days a week, sometimes, more.
So on my team, many people are in the office, so they are together. They are eating lunch together. They are able to just have chats in the hallway. Even at lunch, people are discussing work things oftentimes. And I'm not there. So I have to do extra I think to make sure that I'm kept in the loop.
And I think for me, some of it just comes, because I am the senior engineer on the team so people feel that they need to tell me things, but if I wasn't, even before I was leading the whole project, I would notice that, for example, there were things, decisions would be made or things would happen that I wouldn't necessarily know about.
So even now, I try to always be proactive and ask if there's any discussion or set up mechanisms, like weekly check-ins and things like that, to make sure that I'm kept in the loop.
LIA: Yeah, absolutely, all really good and important things to keep in mind. You all hit on really I think important considerations, and everybody listening at home, you might be thinking to yourself well I'm an introvert, I don't want to talk to my coworkers. That might be true.
But it's still -- it can still have an impact, even if you are somebody who would rather rip your hair out than have water cooler chat with your coworkers.
It means that in some environments, where the team is not taking great care or where you don't have a really responsive manager, you could get left in the dust, especially if it's a hybrid environment. So that was a challenge question. But now I want to move to misconceptions.
And I joked about them at the beginning, that people think you're working from home, that means you're able to just dash off in the middle of your workday to go get your nails done or do something entirely not work-related. There's all sorts of misconceptions about remote work opportunities.
And I'm curious if each of you could touch on what the biggest misconception or misunderstanding is that you've heard from folks about working remotely. I heard everybody at once. Let's go backwards and start with Mike, and then go back down.
MICHAEL: So I think the one that I can speak to the most because it really affects me, if you're working remote, you never have to travel. So most of my team is based in Seattle, so I travel there at least once a quarter, but often more. I would say every two months. Some of it is sort of mandatory where we're having a team week where we have all these meetings in person, and just being together as a team. And some of it is things that I volunteer for. I do a lot of conferences, where I do accessibility training workshops for engineers at Amazon, and this is something that I do as an extracurricular type of thing that has helped my career.
One of the things that went into my promotion is the story about how I've done all these conferences and reached all these engineers sharing my expertise in accessibility. And as a blind person who experiences the need for accessibility features every day. So yeah, travel, it may be something that needs to be done and in order to do that of course, you need the blindness skills, and travel can be stressful. You might be there for a week of meetings or a conference, and you have to efficiently get yourself there, know the lay of the land, be able to get around, and get efficiently from place to place where you need to be and then, you need to go home.
I personally love to travel. So it may or may not be for everyone, and I really invested myself in learning those travel skills and learning how to be really efficient with my travel.
LIA: Yeah, absolutely huge misconception. I don't have to work on my mobility skills if I work from home. Very not true! Okay. And then, I think it was Brandi next.
Or maybe I'm wrong? Maybe it was Danara.
BRANDI: Sorry! I was trying to get off mute. So the one misconception I've heard is people thinking and assuming that I'm lying in bed and working and sitting on my couch. But I am absolutely sitting at my computer chair all day. People thinking working from home, you get to rest and stuff like that.
Nope, I have to sit up all day and type on the computer all day. So that's one misconception. People thinking you're lying in bed or sitting on a couch, just relaxing. No!
LIA: Yeah, especially I will say, I have not worked the kind of job that you have, Brandi, but I spent the first two years of the pandemic working for our local health department as a contact tracer and I worked at a startup providing phone-based support services for senior citizens.
And those jobs where you're working from home and you're making phone calls, it's a call center environment, which means you are not getting up, except for your legally mandated required breaks and that is it.
BRANDI: Exactly!
LIA: Your butt is glued to the desk.
BRANDI: Sometimes when I have a customer who's talking nonstop, I might get up and walk back and forth just to move around a little bit, but I have to come right back to my desk.
LIA: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It is real. And then, Danara, did you have a misconception?
DANARA: So it's so funny. My misconception, I'll do a comparison thing. People think that you're always available, because you work from home. I'm just going to drop by and drop this off. Oh, I'm going to do this and do that. No. I'm working. I do have significantly more freedom, because I'm not answering phone calls and stuff like that. It's not a call center type of environment, but I do have meetings and stuff to do.
Me and Brandi are fairly close and we both work fairly remote, but Brandi can't talk on the phone, because she's already talking on the phone, but if you call me during the day, sometimes, I might be able to sit on the phone and work while you're on the phone, because I don't have to tend to phone calls and I don't have to consistently always talk to customers and people and things of that nature.
So I think a misconception is just the level of availability. It's okay for me to walk away and go put the laundry around or scramble some eggs real quick or jump in the shower or something like that just because I have a little bit more freedom when it comes to schedule.
But all remote jobs are not created equal. Where somebody else may be able to do a few extra things around the house, or answer a few phone calls, another person may not be able to do things.
I've had people with groceries outside and I haven't had a chance to grab the groceries because the calls are coming in. Just knowing that the availability varies depending upon what the person is doing for work.
LIA: Absolutely, really a central point. I think a big takeaway from tonight's call is certainly that remote jobs are still jobs, right? And so there are pretty big variations, right? Just like everybody would understand, there is, obviously, a difference between somebody who works as a cashier at a big box store and somebody who works in that big box store's corporate headquarters doing something vaguely retail related, but still on the white collar side of things. Those are different.
But yes. Salaried jobs are going to look very different from hourly positions, or from contract positions, inbound call center environments, very different from every other kind of environment there is. But you get the picture.
So I want to be mindful of how many people we have on the call, and see if we have any questions from the audience? If folks have questions they want to drop in the chat.
NIKKI: Really quickly, we don't have any questions in the chat, but we do have some comments. So Jennifer says hey, brandy! It's Jennifer from the Lighthouse! So you got a shout-out, Brandi!
BRANDI: Hi, Jennifer!
NIKKI: (Laughs) Linda says this is an excellent meeting. It's diverse in addressing equity. Linda also says that they are a huge advocate for living wages, training, and development. And then, Lacy has a comment regarding getting up and kind of moving around during work. Lacy says they were pacing today, on a phone call with a colleague.
(Laughs)
Everyone needs to get up and stretch those legs and it sounds like people are finding ways to do that while working. We might have a question. Okay. Go ahead with your question.
Howard? He said question, but he didn't ask a question (Laughs), So this question says how do you manage perceptions from employers when navigating accommodation requests?
So how do you handle that, when you have to ask for accommodations from an employer and deal with the perceptions around that?
DANARA: So for me, it's pretty annoying, because I'm like y'all the government, y'all the one who made these laws and ain't nobody following them!
But you guys don't really know me, I will say I'm very outspoken, and so if there's a need, I'm going to speak about that need. I'm not a complainer. I'm not going to snivel. But I will say hey, you guys sent me this spreadsheet, and it doesn't have the columns and the rows so now I have to go all the way back to the top.
I need somebody to fix this and make this ADA compliant or even some of the websites. There are now a few blind/visually impaired employees. There's about 11 of us. We don't all work in the same offices, but we meet quarterly in the big group, and then a few of us meet as a tiger team and we attack things in that way.
We reach out to people. What happens when you work -- Honey Smacks left! (Laughs) What happens when you work in contracting at Wright Patterson Air Force Base is that you work with different apps, different sites, everybody is working in different offices, and we're bumping into accessibility issues.
And so we have started reaching out to someone all the way at Pentagon level in 50a compliance. We have this spreadsheet. You start chain of command, you start supervisor, and it goes up from there. And once it makes it to her, we know it's going to get done.
So I'm just vocal about it and I make sure that my peers are vocal about it and when it comes time for the smaller team of people to handle it, we know who to reach out to, if it's not getting taken care of with immediacy.
LIA: Great question. Love the collective action there. Brandi or Mike, did either one of you want to answer that question, as well?
BRANDI: My job actually employs blind and visually impaired people, so I don't really have to worry about asking for accommodations, because they already have it in place. Like some of the campaigns.
It may be like the program that we contract with or a company that we contract with, it may not be accessible with JAWS, but my job built their own app in the workplace to make it accessible for JAWS. So I'm thankful for that.
MICHAEL: For me, there are a lot of different tools and websites that we use that have accessibility issues. So it is a lot of advocacy that I have to do. I do work on an accessibility team so that means I do have very good support from my managers and management when I need something, but everyone is busy. Everyone has their own stuff to worry about.
So a lot of it does come down to advocating for yourself.
LIA: Absolutely. And I know this question was not directed at me, but our panelists. I will say just because I think everybody on our panel is W-2, I will say I have managed for folks who are doing 1099 or independent contracting work, we don't have any protections as employees. So things like antidiscrimination stuff don't apply to us, because we are not employees, wink.
So there are real risks around it. I will say I have had a couple of minor accessibility things. The agency where I contract as a therapist uses an electronic medical records system that is quite accessible. However, there have been a few updates that have broken things, as tends to happen with tech.
And I will say I manage perceptions. Number one, it helps that these didn't happen from the jump, and these happened at least six months into my time working there. But I just kind of make it really clear that the issue is the tech and not me. And will that fix everybody's perceptions? Probably not. I don't know.
But again, because it didn't happen right away, I was able to establish myself as a pretty reliable person, certainly as a good therapist, and so when issues popped up, I was able to just be like yeah, I don't know! That update went through! And now, I can't see the calendar to schedule clients.
DANARA: Oh, my gosh. The updates, girl listen! Let me go back on mute!
LIA: It's true. And that is an important thing to keep in mind with remote work. You are your own IT. And so this came up a lot when we held a similar panel during National Convention during our Seeking Success Seminar, but you're your own tech support when you work from home generally, depending on the type of job you have.
You may not be completely alone, but it's not the same as when you're in an office and you can just go bother the IT person and be like, this is broken, help me. You have to do a lot of trouble-shooting on your own.
I dread updates! To any of the systems that I use, because I know very well that an update could be the difference between me being able to do my job and me not being able to do my job.
DANARA: We just updated to Windows 11.
LIA: Oh, lord.
DANARA: Listen. It took so much for me -- this last week, week and a half has been terrible. I've had to reach out for coworkers in the last week and a half more than I have probably had to since I got done with training. It's just been a whole bunch of bumps in the road, a whole bunch of things that I'm trying to figure out as I go.
So the updates thing is crazy. And then, another thing is that for me, and for what's his name Mike, Mr. Amazon, depending on what it is for me, I would have to fly all the way back to Ohio. It would be on their dime, but my base that I work for is located in Dayton, Ohio. So if it's a big enough issue to where I need to bring my computer in, I may be able to go to a nearby Air Force base, but nine times out of ten, I'm going to have to go all the way to Ohio if it's an issue that I can't fix via trouble-shooting or if they can't take over my computer and figure it out.
MICHAEL: For me, there's this New York office, but it's an hour and a half commute each way for me so there have been multiple occasions where I've had to go there to see IT, and then the alternative is well they'll send you a new laptop that might take five days to show up and then, you're not working for five days. I feel like that's not a good look if you're one of the few people who's remote.
DANARA: It's really counterproductive.
MICHAEL: Not to mention you can contact IT or chat or the phone, but then you explain I use a screen reader, and they have no idea what you're talking about.
DANARA: And they're like click the blue button! Over on the left side of the screen and I'm like well... (Laughs)
MICHAEL: The last time I did it, they used a remote access software to remote into my computer and that was fine, but then they had to restart it, and I was like well when you restart it, are we going to have the chat session? And he's like no, but there's a way to do it in the remote access client, but it's not accessible.
Luckily he was creative and was like we can just -- I'll open a Notepad window and type into it, and you can read it.
DANARA: That was smart. That was resourceful of him, for real.
LIA: It sounds like yeah, quite a journey having to deal with tech issues while working remotely. I am being mindful of the time, so I apologize if there are more questions in the chat that we are not getting to, because it is officially after 9:00 p.m. But I think we all learned tonight that working from home is a land of contrasts, right? There are pros, there are cons, there are some things that are wonderful and some things that are awful.
And I hope everybody learned a lot tonight to make a more informed choice about what kind of work they pursue. So a huge thank-you to our three panelists for sharing their time, expertise, and experiences. Thank you very, very much, the three of you. And thank you to Nikki for helping facilitate this!
NIKKI: Absolutely! So really quickly because people are leaving. If you could please complete our survey once the Zoom meeting closes. You all will receive a link, because we would like your feedback to know how we did, how we can improve our webinars moving forward.
So please, please, please provide feedback on our surveys.
Again once the meeting closes, you will get a link, and just follow that link to the survey. Also, really quickly, there were a few more questions in the chat. I encourage those people whose questions did not get answered, e-mail us at [email protected]. That's [email protected]. And I will make sure -- if it's okay, I can send your questions to our fabulous panelists and they can provide an answer, and I can make sure that you get that information.
Finally, there was a question, and Zach I hope you're still here, I did see your question around Ability One, and the National Federation of the Blind apparently lobbying against the expansion of funding for Ability One jobs.
I do not have an answer for you but if you e-mail me at [email protected], I will connect you with someone who could answer that question for you and provide more information. So I really wanted to make sure that I addressed that particular question that was in the chat.
But I want to thank everyone, Lia, Danara, Brandi, Mike, for a fabulous webinar.
One of the comments in the chat was from Lyle who asked a question earlier. He mentioned that this really provided a lot of hope for him, because he is currently job searching and this is why we do what we do, right? Building community, providing resources for one another, and, you know, hopefully inspiring and motivating one another to continue to push for their employment goals. So I appreciate everyone's participation, whether you were a listener, a moderator, a panelist, we all helped to create this space.
And I really appreciate everyone who participated tonight. So thank you all!