Clive Hollingshead delivered the program on the day and had an enormous amount of help from Emma Gale in preparing the material. Clive shares his experience below.
I first met Roger Wilson-Hinds and Tim Carrington of Screenreader.net in October 2009 when Emma Gale and I were invited to a meeting with Phil to discuss what the Foundation could do to help them with a project they were about to undertake. Roger, almost totally blind, and older than 75 gave us the following two quotes. I think it was fair to say that both Emma and I were shocked.
“It is estimated that there are nearly 2 million blind and partially sighted people in the UK. Shockingly every 15 minutes someone in the UK begins to lose their sight. “
“There are 140,000 blind and partially sighted people of working age in the UK and 66% of them are currently out of work”
Roger’s project was to take 6 blind people (initially) and turn them into telesales representatives, using screen reader software (Jaws, Thunder, etc.) and salesforce.com CRM. He was obtaining funding from the UK government and was very keen to get up and running. He had already made contact with the accessability team in San Francisco and knew that salesforce would work with the tools available. Tim had already attended an ADM201 in Staines and was equally keen to build an application. We immediately agreed to help.
So, Thursday 21st January eventually arrived. At 3:30 6 blind people and 4 working dogs started to make themselves at home in the Newmarket training room in Staines. I was teaching next door, so they were left in the hands of Emma and Jon Oatham to sort out networks, laptops and connections. Was I happy that I missed that bit!
There are certain things we take for granted as sighted people. The first is that when we plug in a laptop and ask it to go looking for a wireless connection, we will be able to see what it has found, and then act accordingly. While some of that is true for the visually impaired, actually getting everything to talk, work, connect, etc. is very frustrating. Especially when you cannot see what the laptop is not telling you. At least the dogs were well behaved. Actually, I think the dogs were treated better than the humans.
After we had made sure everything worked, I walked to the Travelodge with the delegates. The second thing I have always taken for granted was how easy it is to walk to the Two Rivers car park. On my own. The cycle paths are certainly not designed for blind people, nor are the road crossings. While the people who work in Staines may be fine fellows, they have not been granted buckets of tolerance! But we got there. Dinner in Nandos was fun. I don’t think the other diners were quite sure what was going on, but the dogs were well behaved.
And so to the course. Booked in my QA as
Friday 22nd January - End User Training for Screenreader.net
I had written training notes and these had been converted into Braille, so everybody could follow along. My biggest challenge was not that the delegates did not want to learn (and trust me, on regular end user training that is often an issue), but in my style of communication. I couldn’t point to the page layout on the screen, or indicate which button to click on with a ‘follow me chaps’ comment. This had to be vocally descriptive.
The teething troubles of the previous afternoon came back with a vengeance. Three of the machines needed to be rebooted every 40 minutes, three worked perfectly well. Some people had issues with the screen reader software, for others it worked wonderfully. (Thank you Sebastiano for your patience and help in the morning.) The software literally translates the page layout into words. They hear where they are on a page through headsets. They find links, buttons, fields, picklist fields. They are all pertfect(ish) typists, so filling in fields was not a problem.
And we all accessed salesforce.
We found Organisations, schools that had been preloaded, and were able to edit them. We created Contacts against the Organisation, we created Opportunities. We moved Opportunities through the sales cycle. We created and closed Tasks. The joy when they found the fields and were able to populate them was so uplifting. They enjoyed using our software. Be proud.
It had become a normal sfa end user training day, and the dogs behaved.
And it was brilliant.
In fact the day would have absolutely perfect if it hadn’t have been for the weather. Lucy and Danielle took the dogs for their needed ‘exercise’ at lunchtime in the pouring rain. If you have a dog you will recognise that wonderful smell their coats make when they go out in the rain.
And that is why the training room smelt of wet dogs.
Last quote to ponder on.
“One in 12 of us will become blind or partially sighted by the time we are 60. This rises to one in six by the time we reach 75.”