2938: How Technology is Empowering the Visually Impaired With Employment Opportunities

[00:00:00] One of the reasons I attend tech conferences is to engage with people who are making a meaningful impact on the world through technology. Let me tell you, it's fascinating how the universe often orchestrates chance encounters with such individuals.

[00:00:18] And today I had the pleasure of meeting one such remarkable person here at Experience 2024 in Denver, Colorado. His name is Kyle Johnson and he's the President and Chief Executive Officer at Lighthouse Works. And with an aging population and increased life expectancy, vision loss is becoming a significant concern.

[00:00:42] And in Florida alone, the incidence of vision loss from eye disorders is projected to more than double over the next three decades. But organizations like Lighthouse Central are making a profound difference. The company empowers individuals of all ages who live with any degree of vision loss and

[00:01:01] have to adjust to the reality with grace and confidence. They've been doing this since 1976, helping people be more productive and lead independent lives and offering a blend of rehabilitation, training and employment. But it's how they're leveraging technology that really inspired me.

[00:01:20] So buckle up and hold on tight as I beam your ears all the way to Denver, Colorado where you can join me and Kyle in conversation. So a massive warm welcome to the show. Can I tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?

[00:01:35] Sure. I'm Kyle Johnson, President and CEO of an organization called Lighthouse Works in Orlando, Florida, a social enterprise company designed to create competitive careers for people who are blind and generate redeployable revenue we can use to continue serving people who are blind.

[00:01:52] So it's like our revenue engine to serve. It's a social impact company, I guess you could say. And one of the things I always try and do on this podcast is get people thinking differently

[00:02:00] about the impacts that technology has on people, communities or work and business that you don't associate with technology. Can you tell me a little bit about your work and how you're able to make a difference with technology? Sure. Technology is a massive catalyst for us.

[00:02:14] So for the last 80 some odd years in the United States, people who are blind are unemployed to the tune of seven out of 10. But this is the most highly educated disabled group on the planet.

[00:02:31] And people who have had big careers, they've owned their own businesses, they may have advanced degrees, but then they become blind and they walk in for a job interview with a white cane and everyone assumes they're incapable. So our founding community-based nonprofit Lighthouse Central Florida has been applying

[00:02:49] process technology and training to equal the playing field for living and learning with vision loss. All right, so we work with every age group. So we took those principles and created a social enterprise company. Contact Center is our core driver for sure.

[00:03:06] We have other business lines too like Technology Solutions where our founding software developer is actually a gentleman who's blind himself. So how do you do that in a contact center environment? How do you navigate all these different platforms that most of them, if not nearly all, are

[00:03:25] not accessible? And so in the early days we'd have to test their systems and it was a big hurdle to get over on the sales side. So we created our own development team and what we do is rewrite middleware, software

[00:03:40] that sits in between us and interfaces, not integrates with the customer's CRM or whatever they're using. And we make all those workflows accessible to a screen reader. So our agents have you in their left ear but the computer in their right ear and they're

[00:03:56] navigating using the keyboard alone going through all the workflows they need to perform for that customer. And so when we write that accessibility, we will also automate repetitive behaviors. So let's think maybe it takes three clicks to verify a caller's identity, we turn that

[00:04:13] into one click because we're already in there writing code. So that capability really helped us explode and our growth really is in big ways because of the pandemic. It was an accelerant. You know, the national narrative was no one wants to work and we said seven out of 10

[00:04:32] Americans who are blind, many of them want to work and they aren't given the opportunity or enabled to do so. We know how to do that. And then the other thing was companies, agencies, they had to allow work from home and they saw it could work.

[00:04:47] And so we went from 20 agents in 2020 to over 600 in 2023. Very, very rapid scaling. Today we have agents who are blind working about 200 colleagues of ours are blind, working remotely in our contact center across the 20 states or so in the United States.

[00:05:08] So that has resulted in massive, massive impact and technology. And frankly, our technology coupled with the Genesis cloud and the flexibility and the horsepower it gives us, it really was a match made in heaven.

[00:05:24] And again, we created over 50% of all the new blind jobs created in the US last year because of how potent this partnership is between White House Works and Genesis. I'm glad you've mentioned Genesis. Obviously fate has threw us together here at the experience event in Denver, Colorado.

[00:05:42] So can you tell me a bit about your journey with Genesis? Why Genesis and the story behind that? Sure. Yeah. Well, through that rapid growth, we were early adopters on cloud-based, but we run a pretty simple system.

[00:05:57] We didn't have the flexibility, the real time data that we needed. The quality assurance wasn't integrated. It was just pieces and parts and we're using spreadsheets for workforce management. And so when we shopped, we did talk to a lot of the big telephony companies like Genesis.

[00:06:16] And in fact, one of them was their biggest competitor. And in the end, for one, the people and the culture and the vision of Genesis really appealed to us, but the capabilities were just so profound. Our agents used to be frustrated consistently with lacking accessibility, with downtime

[00:06:43] where uptime was impacted, with usability on the old system. And we have swiped all of those away with this Genesis cloud platform. And then having an amazing ecosystem on the AppFoundry, right? Where we don't have to worry about out of the box requests from our customers.

[00:07:07] We can say yes every time because we know we've got the resources. So that's been a game changer for us. And then quality, being able to go back and listen to calls that are old and not being

[00:07:19] worried about not being able to access them and the integrity of those. And the insights that we can gain. So usually when people hear about Blind Call Center, they think, okay, well, I'm going to have to sacrifice something along the value continuum because this is more doing good

[00:07:39] than doing business. And that couldn't be further from the case. We approached this, we built this to compete in the open market. We start and stop with value performance and quality. If we don't do that predictably, reliably and consistently, the blindness doesn't matter

[00:07:56] because they're not going to hire us. But in fact, most of our call center customers have internal call centers themselves. And we have access to a lot of their data. And in many important categories, we outperform them.

[00:08:11] So early on, they're doubt skeptical and then we end up outperforming their agents and a huge catalyst for that is technology. And from what you were saying before we started recording today, it almost seemed like a symbiotic

[00:08:23] relationship where Genesis are now buying in and believing in what you're doing too. Absolutely. Yeah. So when we looked at the user interface, it wasn't fully accessible. They did a good job, but not fully.

[00:08:36] But in particular, so if you're a legally blind person, but have some usable vision, we use magnification programs. That's easy. But if you can't see anything, right, you have to use a screen reader. We use one called JAWS, Job Access With Speech.

[00:08:51] And that's just software that we get licenses for. And it's ubiquitous across the country. A lot of people use it recreationally and professionally. Well, we looked at the user interface and it wasn't fully accessible.

[00:09:08] But if you're a screen reader, it was laborious because you're tabbing through tabs, tables, pages. And it just had a lot to go through. And so a very small percentage of what was actually on that interface was relevant to us. So we created our own.

[00:09:27] Our IT guys named it first and it was called Lighthouse Calls. That's what IT does for marketing. It's since become Equivista, and it'll be launching very soon on the App Foundry. And it's available to companies worldwide now.

[00:09:42] I think in other markets or in other countries, accessibility standards are less about ADA compliance and more about setting specified, based on the company size, specified this number of employees need to be disabled.

[00:10:00] And people who are blind, it turns out, are fantastic work for people who are blind. And there's upper mobility. So say 40% of our agents are sighted, so 60 are blind. But 75% of all of them report up to a lead who's blind.

[00:10:17] 75% of those leads report to a supervisor who's blind. And we have blind representation at the executive level. So this isn't about a job. It's about a career. And now, yeah, the symbiotic stuff that's coming up now when Genesis found out about

[00:10:34] the interface, they said, hey, can we put it on the App Foundry? And they'll be selling it. We aren't trying to sell it. We built it for us. But we're very happy if Genesis sells it.

[00:10:45] And obviously, the big theme here is AI and just about everything at the moment. Is there anything about AI that particularly excites you from the work that you're doing? And ultimately, are it will help blind people as well?

[00:10:57] Yeah, I think I've come to accept that I will never say AI will never dot, dot, dot. That's not happening. I've got too much respect at this point for what it's capable of. You know, and our value proposition really is high level customer service, first call

[00:11:18] resolution, empathetic listening. The harder, the more complex the training, the longer the training, the more difficult or sensitive those calls are, the better we do. And the more value we can add because that's where attrition hurts the worst for our customers. Our counterpart, right?

[00:11:38] So AI early on and very soon, we'll be able to harness it and really be able to handle those lower tier activities, which generates cost savings for the customer. So that's sort of a layup.

[00:11:53] I don't think that we're very close at all to where AI is going to be doing things like therapy, leadership, sales. A lot of those high EQ roles and there are a lot of contact center call types that require high emotional IQ, high empathetic listening.

[00:12:13] And so that's really, you know, when we look at the near term, we see it more as an opportunity, right? To leverage it and harness it to benefit our customers and add to our value. Long term, you know, I think it'll just be exciting to see.

[00:12:31] And, you know, accessibility has come a long way, you know, from I think it was the Apple. iPhone 3G was the first touchscreen device that was fully accessible. Apple still leads the pack, but they've really inspired other companies to try to catch them.

[00:12:48] And so we are getting there. Hopefully AI can help with a lot of the accessibility in the, you know, the unemployment rate among people who are blind being 70% is not, you know, there's a lot of misconceptions.

[00:13:02] And in 2011 before I met Lighthouse, I'd never met a person who was blind. And if you would ask me what a person who's blind is capable of, I would give you a breathtakingly stupid answer because you don't know what you don't know.

[00:13:16] So it's not about will or skill. A lot of times the barriers to employment or advancement within a company is, you know, the software being used, whether it's accounting or HR or any of those systems.

[00:13:31] So you know, our vision is to see a world where software development standards include accessibility. Maybe AI can help streamline the capability of doing that. Because right now I would imagine it's something that for one, they don't really, a lot of developers don't think about.

[00:13:52] They aren't excluding it on purpose. But if you could leverage a tool, AI-based tool to then make sure that it's automatically going to be accessible per international standards, I think that'd be a big win.

[00:14:07] And from all the conversations you've had on the show floor, the keynotes you've seen, what in particular excites you about everything that you've seen here this week? Well, you know, quite frankly, I sat in on the executive perspective session yesterday

[00:14:21] with the executive team led by Tony, a conversation led by Tony Bates. And frankly, their tenacity to continual improvement and leveraging AI is comforting because we do trust them. They have obviously way more horsepower when it comes to research and implementing this technology.

[00:14:44] So we know that we're going to be able to benefit from it. That vision for that and the vision, Tony made a comment yesterday in that session that what they're really looking to build is a team of people who want to be a part of this mission

[00:15:00] rather than a business model. And so being a very mission-driven company with a social impact purpose, that resonated very highly with me and makes me even more proud to partner with Genesis to know that that's the disposition that they're taking.

[00:15:18] So on that plane ride home, you're going to be taking everything that you've learned here, everything you're thinking about, anything that you're going to be taking away and maybe actioning? Well, I don't know for me as much as a lot of relationships to cultivate.

[00:15:37] I have people that are very, very smart that are involved in our technical side. And so I'm doing them a favor if I don't touch any of that or try to make ideas around it. So from a technical standpoint, no, but from a relationship standpoint, we've connected

[00:15:57] with some very compelling people and companies, leaders here that are interested in being a part of what we're doing and helping us grow that impact while adding value for their companies. So that's sort of the big thing I'm excited about leaving. Awesome.

[00:16:14] And obviously you're serving here in the US, there's a lot of people that you're serving now making a difference. For anybody here in the US that maybe want to find out more about what you're doing,

[00:16:23] maybe they are blind themselves or have family members and want to reach out for you. And equally if there are similar communities or groups elsewhere in the world that would like to follow in your footsteps, where can they find out more information and connect

[00:16:35] with you or your team? Thank you. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you first, I'll say that where we are going is to be the largest, most preferred employer of people who are blind in the world. So it will not be limited to the United States.

[00:16:49] But lighthouseworks.org, lighthouseworks.org gets you to our website where you can find us on LinkedIn, all the social media channels. We're there. I'm there. If you search Kyle Johnson on LinkedIn, it'll give you 10,000 results because it's such an exotic name.

[00:17:05] But if you type in Kyle Johnson Lighthouse, you can find me happy to connect with anyone and share more about what we're doing. Well, I'll add those links to the show notes so people can find you and isolate easily. I'd love to stay in touch with you.

[00:17:17] And as your mission grows and you start to expand, there's an open invitation to come back on any time. But just thank you for stopping by today. Outstanding. Thank you so much, Stan. Appreciate it.

[00:17:27] As we've learned today, I think the work done by Kyle Johnson and his team at Lighthouse Works is nothing short of transformative and inspiring. By providing comprehensive vision-specific rehabilitation services that are not only mitigating healthcare costs but empowering individuals to lead fulfilling independent

[00:17:47] lives despite vision loss, it's incredible. So how can we better support organizations like Lighthouse Works in their mission? And what role does technology play in enhancing the lives of those with vision loss? Please, I'd love to shine a light on this.

[00:18:04] I'd love for you to share your thoughts and join the conversation. So email me techblogwriteroutlook.com, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram at Neil C. Hughes. Please let me know. And if you'd like to come on the podcast and share your story, you can do that too.

[00:18:20] But that's it for today. So thank you for listening as always. And until next time, don't be a stranger.