SAS recruits employees with disabilities to serve diverse customer base
As a summer intern at SAS in Cary, Sean Mealin gets to practice his dream job by making computer graphics more accessible for visually impaired students.
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Sean Mealin, you are likely to see him with Simba, his seeing-eye dog.
“I was born with a little bit of vision, but I lost what I had in about high school,” Mealin said.
Simba is a golden lab who was specially trained from birth to be a service dog for the blind.
As they walk together, Mealin describes himself as like a navigator on a plane.
“The pilot is responsible for making sure the plane doesn't run into things,” he said. “That's Simba.”
As a summer intern at SAS in Cary, Mealin gets to practice his dream job. He's part of a team of designers, coders and testers developing the SAS Graphics Accelerator.
The program makes computer graphics more accessible for visually impaired students. That means pie graphs, bar charts or trend lines need to be represented in high contrast or with sound-based elements. It’s offered for free for visually impaired users.
Mealin is still working toward his PhD in computer science at North Carolina State University. That’s where Ed Summers, SAS’ director of accessibility, first met him.
“I'm always on the look-out for talented young people who are in undergrad or graduate schools,” Summers said.
Summers, who is also visually impaired, has his own guide dog, Chewy, a German shepherd named for Chewbacca in Star Wars.
Summers, Mealin and their special dogs represent how SAS leaders regard those pursuing STEM careers who also have unique life perspectives.
“It's important that our employees have all different unique abilities and skills because our customers do as well,” said Danielle Pavliv, SAS’ senior inclusion and diversity manager. “So we have to have employees that have that same experience so they can create software that can be used by all.”
“Having people who are blind on our team allows us to solve problems that need solving,” Mealin said.
The purpose, SAS leaders say, is to focus on the strength of the students and their critical skills necessary to do the job.
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