Accessibility Toolkit

Perceiving the true potential of technology

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Accessibility

Cath Everett ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 29 Oct 2006 15:28 GMT

Perceiving the true potential of technology

Robin Christopherson is head of accessibility services at AbilityNet, a charity that provides a range of services to help disabled people use computers and the internet more effectively. He manages a staff of seven accessibility and usability consultants, specialising in websites, out of a total organisational headcount of 50.

Christopherson has worked in this field since 1996 when he became an assessor, handling queries on all aspects of technology and disability for the Computability Centre, a charity born four years earlier out of IBM's special needs department.

The Centre provided information and advice services, focusing particularly on helping to restore the productivity of staff who had acquired disabilities in the workplace. It later merged with the Foundation for Communication for the Disabled, a charity offering systems integrator services for assistive technologies, to form AbilityNet in 1998.

Christopherson is well positioned to appreciate the challenges faced by disabled people on a day-to-day basis, as he has a degenerative eye condition that has left him blind. Nonetheless, he gained an engineering degree from Cambridge University in 1992 before training to be a secondary school maths teacher.

Although he enjoyed the role, his vision impairment meant classroom management became an issue so he left to attend a nine-week residential IT training course at the Royal National Institute for the Blind's (RNIB) Manor House school, which has now closed. The RNIB subsequently hired him as an IT instructor.

Why did you decide to pursue a career in IT?
Before IT came along, the number of career choices for those with no or limited vision was very limited. Some people went into physiotherapy, but as we become more sedentary, there's less demand for that. Others did basket-weaving, but baskets are now brought in from places like China. There was also piano-tuning, but people can buy gadgets to do it now, so that's out of the window, too.

But IT has meant that the choice of career for people with vision impairments has hugely increased. It's been a horizon-broadener, because people can now work in offices in front of computers and do the full range of things required of them. They just need the right education, training and systems technology and they're away.

On a personal level, if I'd come along 10 or 20 years before and there was no mature technology on the mainstream side, such as Windows or on the assistive side such as the Jaws screen-reader, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be in the job I'm in now. There are many potholes along the path, but I owe everything to IT. Without technology, I wouldn't have got into higher education and I wouldn't have been nearly as employable.