Michele McDonnall, Ph.D., CRC
The National Research & Training Center on Blindness & Low Vision began a 5-year longitudinal study about assistive technology (AT) use in the workplace in 2020. The main purposes of this ongoing study are to learn more about how and which ATs are being used at work and to identify challenges people experience when using AT on the job. This study will help identify any gaps in existing AT and what is needed to accomplish work tasks. We are sharing our findings with technology companies that can potentially address the gaps and challenges. For this report, we are focusing on the challenges with AT that study participants reported experiencing at work.
We have conducted two surveys with our sample of employed people who are blind or have low vision. The participants in our first survey were asked, “What work tasks are most challenging with the AT that you currently use?” They provided open-ended responses, which were coded into common categories by the research team. The results are available in a journal article published in Assistive Technology (McDonnall et al., 2023).
The top 15 categories were then included in the second survey as a checklist of possible challenges encountered. Participants [...]