Public Employee Press

Hospital computer expert Elliot Miranda
Blind but able

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

The rapid-fire words emanating from Elliot Miranda’s computer sound like those disclaimers at the end of TV advertisements for prescription drugs — only much faster.

To the untrained ear, the sounds are largely unintelligible.

But Miranda has no problem understanding the computer’s gibberish. To him, it’s a vital workplace tool and lifeline.

For Miranda is legally blind. And without the synthetic speech program, he couldn’t do his job as a computer worker at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx.

Miranda, 47, a member of Electronic Data Processing Employees Local 2627, has spent virtually his entire city career at Jacobi. His disability has confronted him with great challenges at work — and some indignities.

Before the synthetic speech program, Miranda needed to put his face up to the computer screen to make out the text, and he used software to boost the type size. As his vision deteriorated, he relied on sympathetic co-workers to read him the code. His strong memory was crucial for his ability to do the job.

He bears emotional scars from occasions when people have been insensitive about his disability. Once when he answered his phone at the services desk, an employee he had known for years asked to speak to “the blind guy.” At one time, he had to block management from moving him to a less accessible office by arguing that it would cause an “undue hardship.”

Pushing back

But he feels lucky to work in the public sector with protections under civil service law and union contracts. Miranda regards the Jacobi administration as more accommodating than the norm in the private sector, though a few managers are sometimes troublesome. “When management pushes you, you have to push back,” said Miranda, who is Local 2627’s shop steward at Jacobi.

When he assumed his current position a few years ago on the hospital’s services desk (often known elsewhere as the information technology help desk), Miranda needed to make a stink for the hospital to shell out $2,000 for his synthetic voice software and training. Citing his rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act got results. He credited his current supervisor with being particularly understanding, helping him get new software and occasionally guiding him when he is outside his office.

With an upbeat and gregarious disposition, Miranda is loath to complain, but he doesn’t hesitate to speak candidly about the roadblocks he faces.

“The last thing I like to do is feel sorry for myself,” he said. “But it really is hard being blind.”

Though he had vision problems in childhood, Miranda wasn’t diagnosed with macular degeneration — a steady loss of vision in the center of his visual field — until he was about 18. People resemble shadows, and he sees their clothes as light and dark. His forehead is scarred from banging into hard and jagged objects. Last year, he had plastic surgery.

“My condition is progressive,” said Miranda, who walks with a cane. “There is no guarantee that I will be able to see light 15 years from now.”

As his childhood years passed, Miranda moved closer to the front of the classroom to see the blackboard better. By the 10th grade, he had trouble making out the words in his textbooks. He dropped out that year after a teacher humiliated him by suggesting in front of an entire class that he was illiterate as he knelt before the blackboard to try to make out her writing.

Miranda soon found a job as an office worker and messenger at a small business in Manhattan. A friendly supervisor, the first of a number of key mentors who helped Miranda with his education and career, encouraged him to pursue a high school equivalency diploma. She also introduced him to the computer, which influenced his eventual decision to pursue a career in information technology.

Every day after work, Miranda quickly walked to the New York Public Library’s mid-Manhattan
research library, where a Librarian — a DC 37 member — helped with his studies. She kept a study space for him and taught him to use a closed-circuit television system to magnify the type of his textbooks.

Union tuition help

Shortly after earning his high school equivalency diploma, Miranda enrolled in the Youth Employment Program for the Handicapped at the Office of the Mayor. Program Director Patricia Karlson knew a vice president of the Health and Hospitals Corp., who helped place him in a work-study position as a computer operations trainee twice a week at Jacobi.

Six months later, Miranda was hired as a provisional Computer Aide, a title represented by Local 2627, and in 1988, he took the civil service exam with the help of a reader provided through the civil service system. A supervisor ensured that Miranda was promptly appointed under a provision of civil service law that lets management appoint people with disabilities to permanent positions from civil service lists.

At Jacobi, Miranda has used his DC 37 tuition reimbursement benefit to defray the cost of his college education. For years, he had a grueling schedule of working full-time, going to class after work and not returning home until 10 p.m. Majoring in marketing management, he earned an associate’s degree at Bronx Community College and completed his bachelor’s degree at Baruch College.

Studying was a great challenge. Before classes started, he had to visit his classrooms and professors to memorize the steps it took to get around campus. He got the names of his texts so he could order audio cassettes of the books.

In school, he counted on the help of readers, including his girlfriend at the time, who would also help him by highlighting the lines on paper to make it easier for him to write.

During his 27 years at Jacobi, he has worked his way up the civil service ladder by taking written education and experience exams. After three promotions, Miranda is now a Computer Associate (operations) Level 3, earning more than $75,000 a year. That is more than double what a typical American with vision loss makes, according to the American Foundation for the Blind.

“His career achievement is even more impressive when you consider that less than 20 percent of Americans who are legally blind are employed,” Local 2627 President Robert D. Ajaye noted.

A close network of family and friends makes Miranda’s life easier.

He and his best friend share a basement apartment in their Bronx home, where their mothers live in their own apartments on the first and second floors. The friends frequently weekend at their second home on a three-acre property in Monticello, N.Y., and Miranda sometimes vacations at his Florida condo.

Miranda’s housemate drops him off at Jacobi each morning on the way to his job at North Central Bronx Hospital, and his 73-year-old mother picks him up after work.

“I’ve managed to get by with a lot of help from God, friends and family,” Miranda said.

For several years, Miranda supervised a staff of about 40 workers in Jacobi’s main computer room. Today, he is among five computer workers at the services desk. He has his own office, where he fields calls from employees who need help with such problems as losing access to the Internet or the hospital network, trouble using applications, glitches with e-mail, and even mundane matters like a broken keyboard or crummy mouse pad.

“Elliot is just wonderful,” said Herminia Estela, a personnel representative who works in the benefits office. “He is always willing to take calls directly and, unlike some other people, takes care of things as soon as possible. He is always a pleasure.”