How Environmental Work Led to Teaching Businesses About Web Accessibility for the Disabled

ENTRY LEVEL

Sharron Rush

Age: 50

Current job: Executive director of Knowbility, Austin, Tex.

First job: Consultant for Easter Seals-Central Texas, Austin

After many years as an entrepreneur and manager in restaurants and other small businesses, I went back to college in my late 30s and graduated with a degree in environmental science at 46. I was very science- and technology-oriented in school, and I figured that I would eventually work for some kind of environmental lab doing fieldwork. We have all kinds of environmental problems in the Texas hill country — oak wilt, for example [a fungus that causes oak leaves to wilt]. At college, I grew thrilled by the capabilities of the computer as it applied to science: in particular, the ability to crunch large amounts of data quickly to help solve problems.

But it just happened that my first job after graduation was in the nonprofit world, for Easter Seals-Central Texas in 1997. Because of my background in conservation biology, I was contracted to work for a program through which Easter Seals employed people with disabilities in creek-clearing and flood-control work. It was a six-week position to help the organization figure out how to bid jobs in a systematic way, looking at all the things you would think about: the terrain, the manpower required, and so on.

Talking to people with disabilities about the years they’d gone without work and about how much this job had changed their lives for the better, I realized how important this kind of program was. But I also realized that Easter Seals, like many traditional nonprofit organizations, was a bit behind the curve when it came to technology. Maybe I was particularly sensitive to this issue because one of my lab mates in college was in a wheelchair, and I’d seen the difference that access to technology had made in her life. Easter Seals generally hired people with developmental or cognitive disabilities for the fieldwork, but there were some people in wheelchairs in the office, and even there they didn’t use a lot of computer technology. So when that temporary job was over, I went to the new CEO of Easter Seals, Steve Guengerich, and talked to him about improving the situation.

Steve is a high-tech leader who decided to dedicate a year of his life to the nonprofit sector as a way to give back to his community. We started brainstorming about ways we could engage the local technology community, which was such a big part of Austin’s growing population, to help provide educational and employment opportunities for persons with disabilities. Knowing how competitive tech people can be, we came up with the idea for a contest: We challenged local tech businesses to learn about accessibility on the Internet, and began training them in accessibility-oriented Web design tools and techniques. The federal government has actually issued mandates for accessibility on the Web, but most professionals do not have a clue about what that means and how to do it. Just as buildings have design features, such as wheelchair ramps, curb cuts, and Braille elevator controls, the Web offers certain technologies to help people with visual, hearing, motor-skill, or cognitive disabilities to browse. When developers consider the usability needs of people with disabilities, they will include a variety of alternative text tags, captions, labels, and so on.

The first year of this Accessibility Internet Rally, 20 technology companies, both large and small, signed up and stated some of their general areas of interest, such as environmental issues, women’s health, and so on. We paired them with appropriate nonprofit groups in those fields and asked contestants to use the skills we’d taught them to design a Web site in one day for the charity. In this context of fun, friendly competition, we gave Web designers the opportunity to learn the “next new thing” without feeling like they were complying with Big Brother. At the end of the day, we had judges who were experts in accessibility — for example, a blind professor from the University of Texas — judge the sites and give awards. When that contest was over, not only did 20 nonprofit groups have excellent new Web sites, but the contestants from the tech community were so energized about the issues, they were ready to be mentors, have internships for persons with disabilities, really get involved.

At that point, though, Steve’s year as CEO of Easter Seals was finished, and his successor was not as interested in technology. So before all the energy from the original event could dissipate completely, Steve and I and some of the original rally participants founded Knowbility as a separate nonprofit organization with the mission to bring the rally to other cities nationwide as a way to raise awareness about the need for information-technology accessibility and inclusion. We’ve expanded our program — accessibility rallies have now been held in Austin, Dallas, and Denver, and we’re looking forward to future events for San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Vancouver, British Columbia. The interest and energy generated by the rallies have helped us foster programs for internships and other programs. What’s great about these efforts is that they present the accessibility issue to people in a way that’s not about government intervention or legislation.

In Austin, these efforts have also helped create a relationship between the tech community and the nonprofit community. During the tech boom of the late 1990s, I think a lot of older, more traditional nonprofits were having trouble adjusting to the entrepreneurial spirit of the growing information-technology business community, while a lot of the people who were tech entrepreneurs were often so damn arrogant, men and women both. They had a tendency to want to tell nonprofits, “Be more like us.” Now that the boom is over, maybe the more traditional nonprofit organizations are having the last laugh because they’re still here.

But rather than sifting through the opportunities to separate the valuable stuff from the hype, some leaders in the nonprofit world tended to reject the whole idea of technology. And I think they may have missed a lot of opportunities for their clients. Tech knowledge and accessibility really can give people with disabilities a way to escape from the unskilled, low-paid, dead-end jobs they’ve traditionally been left with.

I’m not among those who say the nonprofit world needs to act more like a business, but I do think that there are some things that can be learned from the business world. I agree with management guru Peter Drucker that the most imaginative work is being done in the social sector, not in the entrepreneurial capitalist world. But I do think traditional nonprofits can get entrenched in the old ways of doing things. With the work we do at Knowbility, I feel we’ve identified one very clear problem, and if we work really hard for 10 years, we’ll overcome it. Then we should fold up the tent and do something else.

–As told to Sandy Asirvatham

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