Business

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.

Posted Updated

By
Rick Armstrong
, WRAL enterprise multimedia journalist, & Debra Morgan, WRAL anchor/reporter
CARY, N.C. — Many disabilities can limit a person’s career options. Now, some employers actively recruit them, in part, because of a certain disability.

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.”

Simba waits patiently while her companion, Sean Mealin, is interviewed for a TV story

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.

Chewy and Shawn Mealin's dog, Simba, enjoy seeing each other during the work day

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.”

SAS has employees in 59 countries with diverse cultural backgrounds and experiences as well as diverse abilities and disabilities. With SAS, those differences may often be used as valuable assets.

“Having people who are blind on our team allows us to solve problems that need solving,” Mealin said.

Sean Mealin is pursuing his PhD. in computer science at NC State University and is enjoying his summer internship at SAS
In June, SAS won the NACE Diversity and Inclusion Excellence Award for their Autism Spectrum Internship Program. The program offers students on the autism spectrum a tailored process to help them overcome traditional obstacles, which often include social skills issues as well as the anxiety of the interview process for employment.

The purpose, SAS leaders say, is to focus on the strength of the students and their critical skills necessary to do the job.

 Credits 

Copyright 2024 by Capitol Broadcasting Company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.