Lea was looking to get back into an office-style job.
Until 2019, she had done translation work and other jobs using computers, however, her disability made it impossible to continue. Since then, she had been doing a bunch of odd jobs like working in retail and as a crossing guard.
“I wanted to get back to preferably work from home, because that works really well for me,” she says. “I knew I’d need to find something that would enable me to work from a home office.”
A person she knew had a great experience with Neil Squire, so Lea got in contact with the Neil Squire Central Regional Office in Ottawa. Lea particularly wanted to learn how to better use Dragon Naturally Speaking, a dictation software that allows her to use her voice to control her computer instead of a keyboard and mouse, making computer work much easier on her body.
“I’d previously used it a little bit on my own, but I knew there was a lot about the program that I simply didn’t know how to use,” she explains.
She enrolled in the Distance Computer Comfort program, working with her tutor Jody on using Dragon over 12 sessions.
“I basically learned everything about Dragon,” she says, noting that she learned how to use to browse the web and her emails, to jump between applications, and use her computer completely hands-free.
She really enjoyed working with her tutor, and found the lessons quite helpful.
“[Jody] went above and beyond,” Lea shares. “She’s really good and really thorough, like we had a lesson for each week with what we’re going to do, and then at the end she had a little take home test kind of thing [to practice].”
Having also joined Neil Squire’s Working Together program, she was able to land a human resources assistant job.
She credits the training she received from Distance Computer Comfort for making it much easier getting started at work, which also offered accommodations for people with disabilities.
“I would say the main thing for me was I was able to jump into the work faster,” she says. “Had I not had that training in Dragon, I would have been like literally training [in Dragon] at the same time as trying to learn my different work tasks.
“It was a lot less stressful than it would have been had I not had it.”
Lea says her experience with Neil Squire and the Distance Computer Comfort program exceeded her expectations.
“It has opened possibilities that I thought weren’t really there,” she shares. “I would definitely recommend the program to anybody who needs assistance or is looking for solutions with assistive technology.”