I know blind programmers who work in C and Visual Basic in addition to mainframe languages, because as long as they can get at a text file, they can do programming. But if the graphical tool kit you are using requires you to drag and drop items on the screen, you can't do it.

If you were lucky, you could delegate that kind of work away. But if not, and you couldn't get at the underlying text of what you wanted to do, you were out of luck. And that was the frustration many blind people ran into. Then the only way a blind person could do the work was to hire a sighted person as a reader to help run the machine.

The problem is one of attitude. What is it that an IT professional expects from somebody who is blind Ñ do they think that a person will be able to do work, function as a normal human being, socialize and get along with people in the workplace? Or do they think a blind person is weird and can only pick up a phone? IT professionals should examine their thinking about blindness and root out the typical stereotypes.

How will people with disabilities in the state, who are working for the state, how will they deal with this thing?

I'm thinking that, really, we may see some incremental improvements on some fronts [this year]. But in 2000 and 2001, we'll really see some changes.

IT workers at some companies have learned that blind people can compete. But lots of others have never worked with a blind person before, and attitude-related barriers apply.