Press Release March 12, 2001

Source: The Associated Blind
Press Contact: Nancy O'Connell at 212-683-4950

eSightCareers.net Featured in Yahoo! Internet Life Magazine

NEW YORK CITY - The March 2001 issue of Yahoo! Internet Life highlights www.eSightCareers.net, a project of The Associate Blind, Inc. (TAB), New York City. The site helps people who are blind or visually impaired build accessible online resources for managing their careers. In its Touched by The Net column about "ordinary people doing extraordinary things online," the magazine features Fernando Botelho's personal story.

Botelho, technical director for TAB's eSight Careers Network, could see as a child, but, by his late teens, he was functionally without sight due to retinitis pigmentosa (RP). Born in Brazil, he moved to the United States in the late 1980s and studied at Bentley College, Cornell and Georgetown University, earning degrees in sociology and foreign service.

The site's virtual team includes Botelho and his 10 associates in New York City as well as content developers Nan Hawthorne in Seattle, Jim Hasse in Wisconsin and Kelly Pierce in Chicago. The site's team of 13, most of whom are blind, visually impaired or have other disabilities, uses real-time chat, e-mail and telephone to manage the site's technical infrastructure, provide member services and publish fresh content for eSight members each weekday.

Like many of the blind members of the eSight web community, Botelho touch types and uses voice synthesis, which translates the text that appears on his computer screen into speech he hears through earphones. He also uses refreshable Braille display on his keyboard. Others who have visual impairments use screen magnifiers to enlarge the text appearing on their computer screens. Botelho says individual developments in adaptive technology (such as talking computers) have been taking place over the last 25 years. But now, for the first time, those individual technologies, he points out, have been brought together into software and hardware packages that are affordable, compact and useable for people within the visually impaired community.

"That means people who are blind can now compete effectively for a new array of jobs," Botelho explains. "And, for the first time, we can communicate with each other on a global basis and together build a knowledge base about how to best manage our own careers. That's the purpose of eSight."

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