Deborah Kendrick
You think you are a pretty competent computer user. Then, one morning you're sailing along, doing research, writing reports, examining spreadsheets, and: boom! Your screen is frozen. JAWS isn't talking. Or your magnified text shrank to nothing. You wish you had your own private tech support specialist or computer rescue team experienced with access technology for people with visual impairments.
Or maybe you have not been a fan of technology, using your computer only to check email messages from your family and friends. And now, with the pandemic and its accompanying isolation, you wish you could learn more, get some training on that computer or smartphone so you could attend virtual meetings or do some online shopping. How could you possibly find training now, while staying in your own COVID-free environment?
This month's Employment Matters spotlight is on Casey Matthews, an extraordinary talent AccessWorld readers deserve to meet.
I have known Casey Mathews for a long time. I knew he was super savvy with all things computer in the access technology arena, and I knew he started a business, Web Friendly Help, last year for training and troubleshooting. Before writing about him, I wanted to find out exactly how he does what he does and whether we should recommend him in AccessWorld. How better to do this than to subscribe to his service?
I emailed him a question: Could he teach me Twitter? When his confident affirmative reply came back, I went over to the Web Friendly Help website and signed up up for a membership that renews quarterly and, honestly, Casey had earned his first quarterly fee in our first official conversation.
If methodical, targeted training is what you need, Casey provides that. My own need is more of a scattershot "Bail me out of this unexpected situation" thing, and he proved to be excellent at supporting this style of learning as well.
In the Beginning
When Casey Mathews was a kid in Daytona Beach, Fla. public schools, reading was a struggle. Born three months prematurely, his survival was accompanied by the same casualty as so many others who received extra oxygen: he was not able to see. At least, he was not able to see much.
Until he was 13, he had enough vision "to be dangerous," as he puts it—recalling tales of bike flips and near misses—but with concentration and determination, he could manage to read enough of that pesky print to survive. Then, on the brink of adolescence, after a dozen or so eye surgeries that all ultimately failed, the miniscule amount of eyesight he possessed was gone. It was time to learn braille.
For whatever reason (and probably the rebelliousness inherent in every teenager had something to do with it), learning braille was a struggle. He only really worked at using it when teachers in his public high school told him he had to know how to read in order to take and pass the high school competency test. No braille, no graduation. He took and passed the test, but still did not much like braille.
High school was also when he first got introduced to a computer and was immediately captivated by the fact that it could talk. As he says on his company website: “I heard the computer talk and it changed my world forever.” The state-of-the-art system at the time, the mid 1990s, was JAWS for DOS. Casey got permission to take the learning tapes for JAWS home, where he listened and absorbed all the good news they contained. When introduced to the OpenBook software and a scanner, he found empowerment in going to the library, checking out a print book, and taking it home to read.
“Growing up, reading was always a waiting game,” he says, “waiting for someone else to read to me. I wasn’t good enough with braille and I couldn’t read print. Now, I could take a book out of the library, scan it, and read it on my own time.”
After high school he tried community college, but was just not adequately prepared. He didn't know how to find readers, arrange for accessible textbooks, figure out adequate procedures for taking tests. A self-proclaimed introvert, he says he was never very good at asking for help. He dropped out and started looking for work.
Casey explored ways to learn more about what he knew and loved best: computers. Before long, he was on his way to Lions World in Little Rock, Arkansas. They promoted braille there, too, he says, but braille never did turn out to be Casey Mathews’s cup of tea. Technology was, though, and he was soon on his way back to Florida as a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer.
Making College Work
For a while, Casey taught access technology in Daytona Beach, and did some work for Serotek and a Florida paratransit company. He concluded, however, that a college degree was the missing piece in his work credentials, and figured out how to get one without the social environment of a college campus that just wasn’t right for him. In 2004, he launched his four-year-college life, taking all courses online with the University of Phoenix. 2004 was also the year Casey married his wife, Judy, who was by then working as a rehabilitation teacher for the Lighthouse of Central Florida in Orlando. In 2007, the Lighthouse hired Casey fulltime as an access technology instructor and in 2008, he received his bachelor’s degree in information technology.
Sharing the Passion
Since that first computer in high school, Casey Mathews has had a passion for the power of technology, particularly as that power enhances the quality of life for people who are blind or visually impaired.
Once he discovered the Internet, online shopping, tools for navigation, the ability to research, and on and on, he loved not only figuring out how to use everything, but sharing that knowledge with others as well. Over the last 20 years, he has been a technology problem solver for people in all walks of life, and eventually, his dream of working for himself evolved.
Last year, he set up his online training and troubleshooting business, Web Friendly Help. His plan was to find a way to offer the power of access technology to others, for work and play, but to do it at a price that individuals could afford. His solution is a subscription-based platform. You can sign up for a month, a quarter, or a year, and the prices are a mere fraction of what other trainers might charge. If you want weekly lessons on how to use NVDA or VoiceOver, or if you just want someone to rescue you when you are on deadline and can’t figure out how to use a particular website, your membership puts help within the manageable reach of an email or phone call.
Growing the Business
When Casey took that entrepreneurial plunge, he established Web Friendly Help as an LLC, using his own computer savvy to do all of the legal registration and filing himself. He built his website with WordPress. He began spreading the news by word of mouth. Since Casey and Judy Mathews are both blind and users of access technology themselves, they were connected with other groups of blind people and potential customers.
One by one, people began reaching out, testing the water, so to speak, to see if Web Friendly Help could fill their tech needs. On June 30, Casey took a bigger plunge , leaving his fulltime job with the Lighthouse in order to devote all of his time to growing his own business.
Since all training and troubleshooting is done remotely, his customers come from everywhere. He has members in Hawaii, Louisiana, Ohio, and, of course, Florida. Sometimes, someone needs a solution to a discrete problems. At other times, a customer needs weekly training to teach JAWS or NVDA or Outlook or WordPress or something else. He is particularly interested in helping other blind entrepreneurs reach for their dreams.
Getting a job is tough for anyone who is blind, he believes, and finding a job is typically a full-time job in itself. If you have a skill or aptitude or idea that can be turned into a business, why not put that time into going to work for yourself,? Since he has laid just such a foundation for his own work life, he is eager to share what he has learned to help others nurture that entrepreneurial spirit.
Measuring Outcomes
At this writing, Web Friendly Help is one year old, still in its infancy as a company. Casey says that the support and encouragement of his wife, Judy, now the vision rehabilitation supervisor at Lighthouse of Central Florida, has been an essential ingredient to enabling him to pursue his dream. In addition to JAWS and NVDA certification, he is now a certified vendor in the state of Florida, which means that residents of that state who are receiving services from the Division of Blind Services can request training from Web Friendly Help and their training will be paid for by vocational rehabilitation. For others paying privately from anywhere, the rates are affordable no matter what your budget. His own technology tools are simple, a laptop and an iPhone, and he says that drive and determination are the other essential tools that have brought him this far.
I found out for myself that Casey Mathews delivers on the promise displayed on his company’s site. He first dazzled me with his quick tour of Twitter but that was followed with a range of random issues that came up in my three months of subscribing to Web Friendly Help, including the following:
- I somehow inadvertently created a new database for my password protection program, which seems to have obliterated the first. Is it gone? Taking all my passwords with it?
- How do I extract all the email addresses from a forwarded message to send my own invitation to the same group?
- How do I log in to a tele-rehab appointment when the site keeps asking me the same questions?
- How do I find the entryway into a blog page that was mine years ago but that now says I do not have permission?
- My Windows Desktop has disappeared. How do I get it back?
- Where do I find my IP address when someone has asked for it?
Casey solved every one of these problems along with some other inquiries, with his characteristic calm and a little dry humor. He typically restored my troubled technology in just a few minutes. Sometimes, he connected remotely to my computer, had a look around, and, seemingly magically, detected and resolved the problem.
I’ve talked to a few other customers and the responses are consistent. “He’s brilliant,” is a comment I’ve heard more than once, and yet, his is the calm confidence of a professional who actually enjoys taking the time to explain the magic.
Some customers just want him to make things work and they don’t want to know why, and others want a step-by-step explanation. Some want a weekly lesson and some just want to know how to navigate YouTube. If you need help learning a new platform for distance learning or attending virtual meetings, Casey is happy to explore it with you. Web Friendly Help invites you to customize your own support. As Casey says on the Web Friendly Help site: “I can help you become friends with your technology, or boost productivity for you by tweaking the software on your computer or iPhone.”
Another way of putting it might be that for less than a dollar a day, you can have access to your own computer whisperer!
For more information, to become a member, or subscribe to Casey’s blog for tips on taming your technology, visit Web Friendly Help, email him, or call 567-234-0078.
This article is made possible in part by generous funding from the James H. and Alice Teubert Charitable Trust, Huntington, West Virginia.
Related articles:
- Employment Matters: David Van Der Molen, Member Services Associate and Audio Book Narrator
- Petr Kucheryavyy, Senior Manager, Accessibility, Charter Communications
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