About five years ago, while working as a contract instructor at a university in Ontario, Melanie took part in our Distance Computer Comfort program. Today, her career in academia is thriving — she’s an assistant professor at the Memorial University of Newfoundland — and she attributes much of her success to the digital skills she learned in our program, reducing the amount of time it takes her to do computer tasks.

“Academia is not like other industries. It is extremely difficult to move from [contract work] to a full-time position,” she shares. “Because the contract workers are so overburdened and underpaid, it’s very difficult to do the kinds of things that you need to do to advance, like publish. So thankfully, through the time I was able to save, I could carve out time for my research. It would have not been possible without the Distance Computer Comfort course.”

Melanie has an inborn muscle disorder, which affects her mobility as well as her vision. Limited strength and dexterity in her hands made computer work difficult, and while she had some assistive technology to help, she found many tasks took her too much time when she first joined our program.

“An academic position can be a 60 hour a week job — in a full-time academic position, you have to teach, do research, and do service,” she explains. “So, I simply could not afford the extra time… I’m not even exaggerating to say that I was spending an extra three hours a day on the computer just to get things done because of the combination of my complex disabilities.”

She was relying heavily on an assistive mouse, and while it made using the computer much easier, it was slow to use and caused extra eye strain needing to visually follow the small cursor. Working with her Distance Computer Comfort tutor Khatidja, Melanie learned a number of keyboard shortcuts, reducing how much she needed to use the mouse. She picked up useful tricks like increasing the cursor size to reduce eye strain.

Melanie also learned how to use NVDA, a screen reader. Having learned how to use many different assistive technologies and accessibility tools, she could use all of them in concert with each other to make tasks more convenient.

“Khatidja was really good at maximizing the potential in the tech I was already using,” Melanie says of working with her tutor.

“It was just phenomenal how tailored the course was specifically to what you want to do,” she shares. “So, she even helped me with things like putting together PowerPoint presentations — I give a minimum of three PowerPoint presentations a week — and also with quickly navigating the Learning Management System websites I create.

“I was amazed at the depth of knowledge that she had, and how she was able to apply that knowledge in such a focused way to help me very specifically with the things that I needed help with, out of respect for my priorities.”

With the skills she learned through Distance Computer Comfort, Melanie estimates she saves up to three hours a day on many of the computer-driven tasks she needs to do. She credits that time saved with allowing her to pursue the work she needed to advance from contract work to a full-time role as a professor.

“I can’t understate how much of a difference [Distance Computer Comfort] made,” Melanie shares. “Previously I had to struggle semester to semester just to try and win a contract the next year, [. . .] I probably would have lost that work over time if I hadn’t managed to move up in my field. It really did make an immeasurable impact on my life.

“This is the job that I’ve wanted since I was 16 and first saw a publicly broadcasted university lecture,” she continues. “It really is the job that I dreamed of.”