The rewards of enabling in El Salvador.

• Author: Conaway, Janelle
• Position: Inter-American System

In his Monday afternoon computing class in San Salvador, Julio Canizales teaches adult beginners such skills as creating files, saving them on diskettes, and cutting and pasting text. It all sounds pretty basic, but for one detail: Canizales and the students are all seriously sight-impaired or blind.

They study at a computer training center for people with disabilities, run by the Trust for the Americas, a nonprofit foundation affiliated with the Organization of American States (OAS). In the past few months, about two hundred Salvadorans of different ages, educational backgrounds, abilities, and disabilities have acquired new job skills at the center. The training center's twenty computers are equipped with various types of adaptive technology. In some cases people may need different hardware, such as a larger keyboard that responds to the lightest touch, or an easy-to-manipulate trackball instead of a mouse. Adaptive software has also become more advanced, less expensive, and more widely available in Spanish, opening new doors--and Windows--for people with disabilities.

Take the program JAWS (the acronym stands for Job Access With Speech), which translates written words that appear on a computer screen into audible speech. Users execute commands on the keyboard, rather than with a mouse, guided by oral instructions. This software, which works with the Windows operating system, allows a person with little or no vision to send and receive e-mail, look up information on the Internet, and do virtually anything else a sighted person could do with a computer, Canizales says.

"The blind person has one more tool to be able to say to society, `Don't ignore me. I have the same abilities as you do. All I need is this one special program,'" he says.

Society is only just beginning to listen. In telephone interviews from El Salvador, several people with disabilities talked about the frustration they often feel and the prejudice they encounter. Andres Reyes Pineda, who is blind, has a university degree in social science, but has been unable to find work in his chosen field. When potential employers see him, he says, their first reaction is, "How can you do your work if you can't see?" He hopes that new technologies will help persuade employers to overcome their doubts.

One of the center's priorities is to educate local employers about hiring people with disabilities. "There are a pile of myths to tear down," says the center's general coordinator, Daniel...