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No sight means no work Unemployment low for almost everyone, but it's 75% for blind Sunday, September 03, 2000 By Steve Levin, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Labor Day honors those who work for a living, but unemployment among the blind and visually impaired is 75 percent. And Pennsylvania is considered one of the worst states at providing services
Luis Angel LaBoy has had his share of health problems. When he was 23, he was diagnosed with diabetes. At age 41 he had a heart attack. But the biggest obstacle of all has been his blindness.
The difficulty is not his inability to see. LaBoy has no vision in his right eye and little in his left -- and that's deteriorating -- but he gets around fine with his cane or his black Labrador guide dog, Bella.
LaBoy believes his impaired vision has been the primary reason for his six years of unemployment. Even his efforts to earn a high school General Equivalency Degree were stymied for a year, he said, because no local program was willing to supply him with a reader for the exams.
"If it's not one thing it's another," said the 43-year-old Mt. Lebanon resident, whose wife, Merrily, also is legally blind. The couple have five children between them. "As a blind individual, people are scared to give you a job. They say, 'Because you're blind, you might get hurt.' Most people will say, 'My insurance will go up because of the safety hazard.'"
By any measurement, jobs are difficult to find for the handicapped and even more so for the blind. Nationwide, the unemployment rate is just over 4 percent, but among the handicapped it's about 70 percent and for the blind it's nearly 75 percent. About a third of the blind who do work are underemployed, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
Between July 1997 and January 2000, a 30-month period, Pittsburgh Vision Services, which provides vocational and social services for the blind, found jobs for just 38 people, at an average wage of $6.15 an hour. Typically, the jobs are part-time; the employees rarely receive health insurance.
"The county is crying for skilled people," said Dennis Apter, director of vocational services for Pittsburgh Vision Services. "We have to coincide that with training and business community support in providing opportunity vehicles for employment."
An estimated 8.5 million Americans are blind or visually impaired. Blind means people with vision of 20/200 or worse in their better eye, even with corrective help, which is about 10 percent of normal vision. Another way to put it is that a person with 20/200 vision can see at 20 feet what someone with 20/20 vision can see at 200 feet.
A visually impaired person's vision is 20/70 or worse in his or her best eye, although someone with 20/50 vision with a degenerative condition could also be considered impaired.
Pennsylvania does not have a means of tracking the number of blind in the state. Instead, it relies on estimates that two of every 1,000 people are blind and five of every 1,000 are visually impaired. Based on the state's estimated 1999 population of nearly 12 million, there are about 84,000 blind and visually impaired Pennsylvanians.
Neither are there exact figures for the number of blind in Pittsburgh or Allegheny County, but using the same ratio there would be about 8,800 blind and visually impaired people in the county. Pittsburgh Vision Services annually serves about 2,400 persons who are blind or visually impaired. But as Apter said, "Obviously, we don't know how many people we're not reaching."
Blind persons are among the highest-educated segment of the population. According to a 1999 survey by the American Foundation for the Blind, 88 percent of the respondents had at least some college education, and more than a third had graduate degrees.
Technology mixed blessing
While technology has made some tasks easier for blind persons -- the conversion of Braille to text, for example -- it has created other problems requiring more experience and better adaptive equipment. Vocational rehabilitation counselors for the blind say that computer software such as Windows, or other programs requiring blind persons to move a mouse around and click on icons, are virtually impossible for them to operate.
Computer innovations such as speech software packages that speak and voice scanners that audibly "read" text have proliferated. And through the American with Disabilities Act, a 1990 law banning discrimination based on disability, employers are required to take "reasonable" steps to accommodate disabled people. But despite various federal, state and local programs that can help them pay for adaptive equipment, employers often balk.
"The reality is, if you wait for the employer to get what you need, and for the state to review the situation, it's going to take too long for you to get a job there," said Peggy Chong, manager for Newsline for the Blind, a National Federation for the Blind program in 70 cities -- none in Pennsylvania -- where local newspapers are read to blind people over the phone through an electronic text-to-synthesized-speech system.
"If you do not know about software packages [at the job interview], if you can't answer those technical questions, you don't get past that interview point and you don't end up getting that job," Chong said.
One of the most venerable of the national employment programs for blind people has been the Randolph-Sheppard Program, introduced by two congressmen in 1935, one of whom was U.S. Sen. Jennings Randolph of W.Va. It enables blind people to have first priority on all federal property to operate food service facilities.
At its zenith in Pennsylvania, the program provided jobs for nearly 200 people; now just 54 earn a living from it. Known as the Business Enterprise Program, it is overseen by the Bureau of Blindness and Vision Services and its governing state agency, the Office of Vocational Resources. Until July 1999, oversight came from the Department of Welfare.
"The state is not geared to operate a business," said Jack Potts, who has been part of the program for 34 years and for the past three years has been president of the Pennsylvania Randolph-Sheppard Vendors. He currently operates a snack bar in the state's Health and Welfare building in Harrisburg.
"All the red tape you go through," Potts said, "is just bogging down the business. We can't get anything done. The paperwork for new equipment or making new locations -- it takes us a year to get things done sometimes. The state system is terrible."
Potts said he knows of "a lot of blind people out there who want to work," but the Business Enterprise Program suffers from a lack of those who have completed rehabilitation successfully enough to work. A 1995 study recommended that the state contract the program to an outside agency, as many other states do, but the blindness bureau and state Department of Welfare declined to make the change.
Roadblocks everywhere
Albert Schwartzberg, who is married with five children, would be eligible to work in the Business Enterprise Program, but said he wants a more challenging job. Legally blind since 1967, Schwartzberg has been looking for work since December 1995. The college graduate and Squirrel Hill resident has had job interviews, held occasional part-time jobs, worked with counselors from the state blindness bureau, taken aptitude tests and had an internship in a Community College of Allegheny County computer program called the Institute of Advanced Technology.
Located at CCAC-Allegheny campus, the 14-year-old institute is an intense, yearlong customized program for persons recommended by counselors from OVR, the blindness bureau and the Veterans Affairs Department. Its $12,776 per-person cost is paid for by the agencies.
When Schwartzberg took the program's aptitude test, he said he was not provided a reader or an enlarger so that he could clearly read the math and logic questions. Nevertheless, he said, his cumulative score was 103 out of 104.
He was accepted into a six-week evaluation program, and, according to director John Bernard, "he had a lot of skills already." Bernard said a program known as "Jaws" was recommended to enable Schwartzberg to better utilize the Windows software program.
Schwartzberg said he learned Jaws and then reapplied to the institute in order to update his computer skills. He said he was told by a placement counselor that he should get a job instead and was not admitted to the program.
His vocational rehabilitation counselors with the blindness bureau have helped him line up only one job interview, he said. Two June job interviews did not result in employment. Schwartzberg said he and his family might have to move out of state in order for him to find work.
"We have to find more opportunities for full-time employment," Apter said. "The types of opportunities we have are not as broad in terms of scope. There have been some supportive employers in the Pittsburgh community, but in general there are still many businesses that aren't as receptive as they should be with opportunities for employing the blind and the visually impaired."
But first, blind persons must overcome the attitude barriers of society, said Bill Chrisner, president and executive director of Three Rivers Center for Independent Living, a nonprofit organization in Point Breeze that helps people with disabilities live productive lives in the community.
The critical tool the blind need to succeed, Chrisner said, is a college degree. Studies have shown blind and visually impaired persons with college degrees are much more likely to find work than those without degrees. For the blind, college is more appropriate than most trade or vocational schools, whose training programs aren't easily adaptable. To facilitate college, many states, including Pennsylvania, provide blind individuals with tuition help.
That's how Chrisner earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1970 -- with tuition help from the blindness bureau. The Point Breeze resident went on to earn two master's degrees from Pitt before taking his present position with the center in 1988.
"College is extremely important because you almost have to be overqualified to compensate for the prejudice of employers," Chrisner, 52, said. "Without the two master's degrees I wouldn't have gotten this job."
The blindness bureau pays up to $8,100 per year for tuition, room and board for blind college students. The sum does not include the cost of adaptive equipment such as scanners and enlargers, for example, but much of that also is available through the state.
Since the blindness bureau has come under the purview of OVR, however, there has been discussion to decrease the $8,100 stipend. No decision has been reached. Advocates for the blind think such a change would be disastrous.
"Our clients [would] suffer," said Jim Bruce, a vocational rehabilitation counselor in Pittsburgh and the local union's chief shop steward. "It costs a lot to go to college when you're blind. The lower middle class and poor people [would] have the toughest time. Some of them have a family income that is just enough to knock them out of scholarships but not enough to send them to college."
Despite the difficulties, Luis LaBoy began college in August. Earlier this year he found a General Equivalency Degree program at Goodwill Industries' Workforce Development Center on East Carson Street that provided him a reader for the tests. LaBoy, who has been president of the local chapter of the National Federation of the Blind, will enter the North Side campus of Community College of Allegheny County and study social work. He hopes to pay for his education through state and federal loans.
"Without the education there wouldn't be any self-confidence," LaBoy said. "Since I did everything on my own -- with a little coaching -- I have a lot of confidence I can do more.
"My family is real happy about this. They knew I had it in me to do it."
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