© 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ert.10050 People are still talking about “that blind man who was on Jeopardy and answered all those tough questions!” What Jeopardy fans do not know or do not remember is that the contestant, Eddie Timanus, works everyday—not as a quiz show participant, but as a sports reporter for USA Today. Sports fans discuss the performances of Marla Runyan, the first visually impaired athlete to qualify for the Olympics, and Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind man to scale Mount Everest. What they may not know is that both Marla and Erik had full-time teaching jobs that supported them as they trained to become worldclass athletes. These three individuals have excelled not just because of their innate abilities, but also through being productive members of the workforce. Unfortunately, the simple act of working is not a reality for many adults with visual impairments in this country. The most recent data available from the Census Bureau (1997)1 on employment rates indicate that only 31 percent of blind and 44 percent of visually impaired individuals between the ages of 21 and 64 are employed. However, when asked if they want to work, two-thirds of disabled adults without jobs indicate that they want to work. What, then, is keeping these eager-to-work adults out of the labor market? The greatest barrier to employment for people with visual impairments may well be employers’ lack of awareness concerning the abilities of blind and visually impaired people. Not understanding something tends to result in avoiding it. Most people do not understand blindness because they have never experienced it or have never met anyone who is blind or severely visually impaired. Given the low incidence of blindness in the general population, that is not surprising. Although there are estimates that as many as 10 million people in the United States are visually impaired, only 1.3 million are legally blind (meaning that they qualify for social security benefits and rehabilitation programs for people with disabilities). One might ask, “Can such people work successfully in a world where the vast majority of people are not only sighted, but rely heavily upon their sight for gathering and processing information?” The answer is a resounding, “Yes.” People without sight or with limited sight can perform almost any job imaginable. There are visually impaired lawyers, artists, architects, accountants, secretaries, customer service representatives, food-service workers, factory workers, financial analysts, teachers, medical transcriptionists, day-care workers, counselors, computer programmers, cooks, salespeople, and more. They ply their trades by using residual vision enhanced by spectacles and other optical devices, large-print documents and labels, or video magnifiers. If they have little or no residual vision, they may use computers with speech or braille output devices attached, portable speech-output PDAs,