Changing Employers Cognition: Personal Mobile Technology as a Workplace Enabler for Blind and Visually Impaired Workers

Most employers believe blind and visually impaired people (BVIP) cannot perform essential job tasks and require expensive accommodation. The emergence of smartphones, enabling applications, screen readers, and Internet access provide a personal assistive mobile technology (PAMT) bundle which dramatically extends sensory capabilities for BVIP. PAMT should afford new workplace capabilities. However, the promise of these capabilities has not yet been accounted for by job-skill trainers, employers or policymakers. We articulate a theoretically informed model of task capabilities fit to account for the enhanced capabilities of PAMT-enabled BVIP. We offer our model as a diagnostic tool to help employers, vocational rehabilitation agencies, and policy makers evaluate the utility of these capabilities in various organizational settings and distribute resources in a more efficient way. We introduce experimental and exemplary demonstrations as a means of assessing the goodness of our model and disseminating information regarding these new BYOD capabilities into the workplace.