Sam Proulx 00:00 | Hello, everybody. This is Sam Proulx, InclusionHub Podcast's host. I'm also the Accessibility Evangelist here at leading accessibility testing platform Fable, powered by people with disabilities.

Sam Proulx 00:14 | And as we've discussed in several episodes, involving people with disabilities—not only in any meaningful conversation about equality and accessibility and inclusion, but regarding actual improvements that can be made as we move forward as a society—is absolutely critical.

Sam Proulx 00:36 | As many of our guests have stressed: the disability community must be included from inception, no overlay is going to fix the internet. No app is going to remedy decades of digital exclusion. In fact, such quick fixes only perpetuate and exacerbate the problem. And when we talk about true, meaningful accessibility and inclusion, we're talking about this throughout society, in healthcare, housing, transportation, digital access, and employment.

Sam Proulx 01:06 | I'd like to discuss the importance of that last facet for just a moment. October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month in the United States, NDEAM for short, and DEAM—globally created to celebrate the significant contributions of people with disabilities in the workforce, highlight inclusive employment policies and practices and raise awareness about just how far we still have to go toward achieving true equality.

Sam Proulx 01:35 | At Fable, we believe that the best gateway to employment, especially in the tech sector, is access to skills. That's why Fable developed Fable Pathways, a training program created by people with disabilities for people with disabilities. And this month, we're launching a brand new training course with former InclusionHub Podcast guest, Judy Heumann. All of our courses are free and available to anyone with a disability. Find out more at FablePathways[dot]com.

Sam Proulx 02:05 | Now, the theme for NDEAM 2022 is 'Disability: Part of the Equity Equation,' and I thought an incredibly meaningful way to highlight this oh-so-critical cause would be to share a special conversation I recently had with someone very special to me. You see, I happen to know somebody who spent more than three decades employed at one of the most consequential tech giants on the planet. And he's just one of more than a billion people in this world living with a disability, and about 15 million living with blindness. I am another. I'm also his son.

Sam Proulx 02:44 | My father Rej spent more than three decades at IBM developing mainframe programs for some of Canada's largest banks and premiering accessibility solutions to allow blind people to become programmers. And I'm honored to invite him onto the show for this important discussion, which, through sharing moments from his life and career, touches on so many pertinent aspects of these issues, from education, employment, and discrimination, to the ongoing quest for true accessibility and inclusion, evolving technologies that change the world, and so much more.

Sam Proulx 03:21 | Before we begin this two-part conversation with my father [Part II will be released later this month], I just wanted to mention that this podcast is made possible by its sponsors, InclusionHub[dot]com's Founding Partners, leading CRM platform provider Salesforce, HubSpot Diamond Partner, Agency Morey Creative Studios, Fable, and Be My Eyes, a free app for the blind and low-vision community, connecting users with sighted volunteers, which my father and I both use and absolutely love.

Sam Proulx 03:51 | All right, let's get this started. This is a fun, fun experiment. I don't think there are too many podcasts that are a father-and-son conversation. And I don't think there are any that involve people with disabilities or folks who are blind because that tends not to happen. And so yeah, to give some background on this on this podcast, it's really about, as you may have seen from some of the outline and stuff, the history of accessibility, and inclusion and accessibility advocacy with a focus on digital accessibility. I thought it would be the ideal conversation to have because I've been around talking computers for as long as I can remember because you worked at IBM for over 3—

Rej Proulx 04:34 | 33 years I worked there.

Sam Proulx 04:37 | Yeah, which is quite some time. But before we dig into that, why don't we start a little bit further back at the beginning, because we've been hearing a lot about discrimination and lack of access and the way that some of the advocates in the United States like Judith Heumann were inspired to advocacy by the discrimination that they experienced in education. And of course, you grew up in a tiny, rural town as a blind person, and you were pretty quickly shipped off to a school for the blind. That was like, what, 1,000 miles away from home?

Rej Proulx 05:18 | That's correct. It was, well, 1,000 kilometers, which is probably 700 miles. But really, in those days, you got to go home three times a year. And you didn't talk to your parents. I mean, that was long-distance. And I don't know if you remember, but like, long distance was prohibitive, you know, so we used to call in the middle of the night or call on Sunday afternoon to try to get discounts and even that was expensive. So we didn't talk to our families.

Sam Proulx 05:49 | Yeah. And so it was a boarding school experience. Perhaps that is not analogous to the boarding school experiences that people are having today where they are talking to their parents and things like that. But the School for the Blind, which was W. Ross [Macdonald] here in Ontario, because we're out of Canada, was also maybe not what it should have been and not the experience that was perhaps equal to the schooling that sighted people got from an education perspective, as well.

Rej Proulx 06:18 | The education that we got, I had confirmed later on by a lot of the staff, was actually, well, the way they termed it was we were 10 years behind educationally, in practices. And I don't know how educators determined this stuff. But they thought that the way we were taught was 10 years behind. But with the education, they did what they could. I mean, there weren't a lot of braille books and not a lot of literature and not, you know, so they kind of did what they could, but I think what's far worse and what contributed to a lot more strife amongst the people that went there was the residence experience.

Sam Proulx 07:01 | Yeah, there was a lawsuit about that a while back.

Rej Proulx 07:04 | Yeah, there was. Fortunately, I had a good family. So I was damaged by it, but not irreversibly. But I know in my graduation class after I graduated from there, I went up to Hearst, Ontario to do my Grade 13, which is really pre-university. And that, by the way, was a wonderful experience. It was a small town that had no discrimination—I can't think of any. It was absolutely wonderful. In fact, I even got a job. I was a dispatcher for a volunteer fire department. I had this job interview, and the town administrator, whatever, didn't really know what to ask me and goes, 'Well, can you tell time?' And I went, 'Yup, it's 10:35.' [Quoting the man:] 'You got the job.'

Sam Proulx 08:02 | Maybe that says more to what they were looking for in a fire department dispatcher in the '60s, then I don't know if that would happen today. Right? There's probably a lot more requirements for that.

Rej Proulx 08:12 | No, there was a lot of requirements for that. You had to know the town.

Sam Proulx 08:17 | Yeah.

Rej Proulx 08:17 | But he knew I knew the town. You had to speak French and English. And he knew I could do that. In fact, he couldn't speak French, but I could. And so you know, he knew that was fine. And so there were some requirements. I couldn't fill in the logbooks. But he knew enough about braille that I could write it out, so I don't forget and then get the guy on the next shift to fill in. You know, what, when, in fact, most of the time, we didn't have fires. I mean, when I was on night shift, I would go down there and lie on a stretcher and put the big red phone under the stretcher, and I'd sleep and then I get up the next day and go to the beach. Now, when the phone did ring, you stood right up—man, you know.

But that was actually a wonderful experience for me. Because it demonstrated that yeah, I could do stuff, you know, like I was hireable and it demonstrated to the town, yeah, they could accommodate me. Now I didn't stay there because there's no future in that. It was a lumber town and there's not a lot of it. So I didn't really stay there. But it was kind of a stop-gap, a wonderful experience where I made a lot of friends and it undid a lot of damage that the School for the Blind did. I realized that I could function as a human being in a sighted community. I mean, there was no blind people there.

Sam Proulx 09:47 | Yeah. And even aside from the abuse that occurred, which you don't want to minimize it, but you were in a setting where all of your friends were blind and all the people you hung out with were blind and suddenly being thrown into the sighted community again would be an adjustment.

Rej Proulx 10:02 | Well, yeah, you sink or swim. But I remember the first day of school, I was in there, and I met a cousin. And he made me really feel welcome. And then everything went uphill from there.

Sam Proulx 10:14 | Yeah, that's the difference that one person can make, right?

Rej Proulx 10:17 | Yeah. And you have to make friends easily, which I do. And you have to be able to schmooze. Well, that's a lot of it. That's what it is, you know, in schools, you know, you hang out and you do bad things.

Sam Proulx 10:34 | Of course, you do bad things (laughs).

Rej Proulx 10:35 | Yeah.

Sam Proulx 10:37 | That second adjustment, it sounds like was a lot easier for you coming out of the School for the Blind than it was coming into the School for the Blind, because of course, you started in Grade One, and you spoke French and got shipped off to an English school.

Rej Proulx 10:48 | Yeah, but that was okay. I was a big kid, you know. And I got put in there, couldn't speak a word of English. And I had a big appetite. And how do you ask for food? Well, I figured out that if you beat the crap out of the guy next to you, and you take his food, then they'll give you some. Which is just a terrible thing to do, but it's survival. I mean, I didn't hurt them too bad. I just got food.

Sam Proulx 10:49 | Yeah, well, I mean, there's always unfortunately, it seems like a physical component to self-advocacy, in some cases, you know, all the protests and marches that happened in the States. So you came out, you got your first job, you were dispatch, and you realize there was no future in that. So how did moving on happen? I mean, you ended up at university for computer science, but I mean, people with disabilities today find it hard getting into university for computer science, I couldn't do it. I mean, how did that happen?

Rej Proulx 11:48 | Well, during those days, the Ontario government, which is a Province of Canada, had a wonderful rehab program. So I went for a whole bunch of psychological testing. And it was just wild. It took like three days. And by the time I got through with it, I didn't know who I was. But anyway, I went through all this and answered all their questions. And so they told me that if I got accepted into university, I could stay there as long as I pass courses. They didn't tell me what to take. They said, well, you pick what you take, we'll give you so much a month, you know, kind of a living thing.

The university was very good, instead of making me pay by semester, they allowed me to pay by month for my residence fees, which, you know, so they were very accommodating. And so I went to university, and I took a bunch of stuff because I didn't know what I wanted. The psychologists or psychiatrists or whatever you want to call these guys, they weren't very helpful. They took me on the side and they said, 'Well, we think you can do anything.' Well, and they're right. But you know, kind of a jack of all trades, professional at none.

Sam Proulx 13:12 | Yeah. So you got into computer science, just sort of by default? Or did you encounter a computer at university for the first time and realize, 'Oh, this is going to change the world?'

Rej Proulx 13:23 | No, I knew about computers at the time, I'd seen one, the big tape drives and all the, you know, they sounds like a bunch of seals, you'd have to experience it, the reels of tape going back and forth. And it's really something. But what happened was, I decided that I would take a computer science course just to see what it was about. It was absolutely miserable. It was inaccessible. It was punchcards. It was horrible. But I figured out for very simple programs, you know, that I figured out how you could keypunch. And then I would, you know, get them to put the stuff through the card reader. And the kids were very good, they would read them out and tell me what the errors were. And then I would have what's on the cards all written out in braille so that I knew which card I could go, and so I could modify it and all that.

That took a long, long time. So it made it difficult to keep up with assignments. But I'm kind of a—I don't fail. I've never failed in anything. And so I wasn't going to fail at that, either. And so I got talking to the professors and the university discussed this. And they said, okay, we'll do a little fundraising and we'll get you a braille terminal. And they said that we're not going to worry about how long it takes. But you have to complete the courses, no matter how long it takes, because they said, we're not based on time, we're based on learning.

Rej Proulx 14:10 | And like, that was wonderful. So, you know, I went and got into computer science. And my second and third year, when the courses really got tough, the really difficult ones, in one case, a professor said, 'Okay, you have to take spring school, and while you're retaking spring school, you finish your assignments. And because you're in spring school again, you know, it's not going to be a free ride, you have to rewrite all the tests, too.' So you're kind of taking one course and writing tests for two courses. So it's not a gift, let me tell you, because computer science exams were difficult. But I did that. And, and I would finish, and then got, you know, reasonable marks as compared to everybody else. Nobody did well, in computer science, we used to do so horribly on exams that they would bow-curve them.

Sam Proulx 16:04 | Yeah, which I think they still do today.

Rej Proulx 16:06 | Yeah, they probably still do with it, you know, it was a lot of sorting and searching, and that. And in a lot of cases, whereas on a test, you would have to describe or draw an algorithm. You know, how do you do this search? You know, how do you do a binary search? How do you do—I forgot, but it's a whole bunch of them. You know, and what's a stack and a deck, and—so I had one computer science professor who did a lot of my exams, who, by the way, had been an IBM Fellow. And he said, okay, he says, you know, you could write all this stuff out in braille, I'm gonna get it all translated. But that is expensive. And it takes a lot of money.

So I would stand in front of his desk, and he would ask me questions. And so if you do an exam, you can be given a question and take five minutes to think about it. Well, not a chance, not when you're interviewed orally like that. And so it was very evident what I knew. So I would get halfway describing the algorithm, and he was, 'Ah, you know, the stuff,' you know. And so it wasn't a free ride. In fact, it was a lot less than a free ride, because it was very difficult. But it was worth it. Because it was a challenge for me. And I thought I was going to actually fail a couple of times. I almost didn't make it. But I, well, you know, you persevere. And finally, I graduated.

Sam Proulx 17:46 | So the motivation for computer science is stubbornness.

Rej Proulx 17:50 | Probably. Yeah, stubbornness. And I wasn't—I'm not interested in English or lit, I'm just not interested. I'm not. I'm not an academic. So you want to do to find one, I want to do something that I could touch.

Sam Proulx 18:07 | Yeah, which in the early days was computers.

Rej Proulx 18:10 | Well, it still is.

Sam Proulx 18:12 | You think so? That hasn't changed. It's all software. I mean there's no big tape drives and hard drives.

Rej Proulx 18:18 | Oh, well, yeah. But you weren't allowed to go in there really. I mean, that was a very secure environment. I mean, I used to go in there. But you know, you had to go in there very carefully. And so what it was, was you would put your punch cards in the card reader or eventually we got these teletypes. So you'd be typing on a terminal. And they all worked in line mode. You know you did everything in line mode, you had line editors and all that stuff, there was no screens. I think today, it's more feely because you can pick up your laptop you can take it apart. Well, you can't take it apart anymore, but you used to be able to take it apart. And you know, there's a disk drive that you're aware of, well, not anymore because they're solid state. But hey used to be, you know. So it's changed, but, you know, it's still feely.

Sam Proulx 19:18 | Yeah, even though I mean, you used to have to care about how quickly you access the hard drive, so it wouldn't break whereas now you're writing a program in a programming language that's 15 steps away from the hardware.

Rej Proulx 19:30 | I did some, but I learned computer languages that were very hardware. Because this was computer science. This wasn't some kind of business. You know, I talked to a guy from IBM one time and he said, so you're learning how to write compilers. And he says, we only need five of them and we've got eight, you know?

Sam Proulx 19:57 | Yeah, but it's the theory that's important. But, yeah, it all seems like it happened, in part because of a government program, but a lot of because of fundraisers and charity and volunteering and people willing to put in the extra time. And now we have more programs, but it seems like maybe less of of that is happening. And I don't know what, like, what you did then, in some ways feels like it's not happening today. And I wonder why?

Rej Proulx 20:28 | Oh, it's a question of work-life balance. We had a good grasp of work-life balance, we knew what it was. We knew when to work, we knew when to quit, we knew when to have a happy hour. And we were kind of more controlled and more stable. It didn't feel like that. But as compared to today, we were. And so people, not only if they liked you, they made time for you, and they had time for you. And so if you were friendly, and if you did your part, then it's easy. And you know, there was very little discrimination. Well, we can talk about some of that later. There's always some, but there's ways of dealing with it. So I really didn't wasn't discriminated against very much.

Sam Proulx 21:24 | Yeah, because you were likable and have the opportunities and, and things like that. And the world moved a bit slower. Maybe.

Rej Proulx 21:33 | I wasn't going to fail either. And they knew it—well I might have.

Sam Proulx 21:38 | Yes. Yeah, the impression that people have of you because that didn't happen for a lot of other members of your high school graduating class. Right? How many of them were employed?

Rej Proulx 21:46 | I mean, I got into Bitcoin, and I still didn't fail. I made money, which a lot of miners didn't.

Sam Proulx 21:55 | Yeah. But I mean, I guess, I wonder what the difference is between the experiences that you had, and the experiences that the rest of your graduating class had because they all lived at that same time.

Rej Proulx 22:05 | Well, a lot of them were 'Yes' people. A lot of them did as they were told, because maybe their spirits were broken a little bit, you know, maybe. But remember, I told you, like, I was a big kid. And I started out fighting. And some of the nonsense that went around was so—I just didn't take it. Physically, even. I just wouldn't take it. Never mind. And so if you get somebody that'll bite back, then you don't bite. It's simple as that.

Sam Proulx 22:44 | Well, I guess that about does it for now, seems like a good spot to pause. We'll pick up this extraordinary father-son chat, in recognition of Disability Employment Awareness Month, in our next episode. Dad, I love you a ton. You know this. Thanks for joining us and sharing your experience with our listeners. And yes, I'll remember to take out the trash later. So there's no need to remind me for the twentieth time.

Sam Proulx 23:10 | And to all you others out there: A huge thank you, as always, for listening and being a part of this continuing discussion about the disability rights movement, and the ongoing battle for equality, accessibility, and inclusion for all.

Once again, please check out InclusionHub[dot]com to learn more about this podcast, peruse its directory of businesses dedicated to improving digital accessibility and inclusion, and much more. It's there you can also learn more about our sponsors, InclusionHub's Founding Partners, leading CRM platform provider Salesforce, HubSpot Diamond Partner Agency Morey Creative Studios, Fable, where I work, and Be My Eyes, a free app for the blind and low-vision community connecting users with sighted volunteers, which my father and I both use and absolutely love.

One final note to also visit FablePathways[dot]com and check out those amazing courses I mentioned at the top of the show. Until next time, remember: A more accessible and inclusive world is a better world.