Our Company's History

IDEAL Group is a privately-held 2002 spin-off from IDEAL at NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR).  IDEAL Group is a professional services organization whose mission is, "To develop and use advanced technology in support of enhancing the quality-of-life, independence and employability of persons with disabilities."

1/1/89 through 12/31/90

In 1989, Darren Kall started what became to be known as AT&T’s Employee Technical Advisory Panel (ETAP).  Darren joined AT&T in 1988 and was surprised at how inaccessible AT&T’s products were as a whole. While there were some accessible products designing for accessibility was not a unified effort across the company. While AT&T had advisory groups they focused mostly on policy and not technology.

Darren brought a personal bent with him from his home life with a family member with disabilities and his training in graduate school in cognitive and perceptual psychology.

After about a year of going through formal motions and presentations with AT&T management he gave up trying to get official funding and approval to improve the accessibility of AT&T’s products. This was the catalyst that sparked Darren into launching a grass-roots effort to enhance the accessibility of AT&T products on his own.

The original group Darren pulled together included 25 people who were interested in accessibility from many divisions within AT&T.  One of them was Betsy Dixon and another was Jim Kutsch.  Jim became the first chairman of ETAP. As Darren and his early rebels started reaching out to other AT&T employees with disabilities the organization quickly grew. Darren served as the business manager for ETAP for 10 years. He brought many AT&T projects into review where ETAP questioned, redesigned, and enlightened product teams across the company to the benefits of accessible design.

There were several spin-offs from ETAP’s efforts. They spun off regulatory efforts, architectural efforts, and formed IDEAL at AT&T, an all volunteer, employee led, not-for-profit organization focused on more effectively accommodating the needs of AT&T employees with disabilities. The motivation to bring internal AT&T communities of employees with disabilities together was that two-fold. First, AT&T’s large population of employees with disabilities represented a strong lobbying group for fairness to individuals with disabilities. Second, there was anecdotal evidence that employees with disabilities were not being treated equally or accommodated fairly.

Keep in mind that these were the days when AT&T employees were influencing the policy-makers crafting the ADA. ETAP soon began to lobby AT&T management and HR professionals showing them the business benefits of effectively accommodating employees and customers with disabilities. It was not long before it became clear that designing products with accessibility in mind and accommodating the needs of AT&T employees with disabilities became missions of their own.

Ultimately, the employee advocacy effort split-off from ETAP.  The advocacy group incorporated as a not-for-profit in the state of New Jersey and re-named itself Individuals with Disabilities Enabling Advocacy Link (IDEAL) at AT&T.  IDEAL was, from that point forward, managed entirely by AT&T employees with disabilities. IDEAL's objectives were to:

• Synthesize diverse thinking into innovative actions that yield customer benefits and competitive advantage in the area of designing accessible telecommunications products and services;

• Develop the professional and business skills of AT&T employees;

• Act as involved community citizens around the world; and,

• Provide educational leadership in support of better understanding the diverse ethnic and cultural aspects of conducting business globally.

1/1/91

AT&T acquires NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR) in an attempt to realize the synergies it believed inherent in the coming integration of computing and communications.

10/1/91

Steve Jacobs is elected as an officer and appointed to the Board of Directors of IDEAL at AT&T. Within a few months Jacobs assumed Chairmanship of AT&T Global Information Solution's Project Freedom.  The mission of the project is to research, develop, and commercialize Interactive Video Relay (IVR) services in support of people who are deaf.

1/1/95

AT&T announces that it is planning a divestiture in September of 1995

7/1/95

IDEAL at AT&T's bylaws are re-written in preparation for AT&T GIS' spin-off into an independent, publicly-traded, company.

9/1/95

AT&T formally announces that it is restructuring into three separate companies: a services company, retaining the AT&T name; a products and systems company (later named Lucent Technologies) and a computer company (which reassumed the NCR name). Lucent is spun off in October 1996 and NCR in December of 1996.

12/1/96

AT&T GIS reassumes the name NCR Corporation.

1/1/97 through 7/31/99

IDEAL at AT&T continues to operate under AT&T's business charter.

8/31/99

Jacobs, with the support of NCR's legal team, re-incorporates IDEAL at AT&T under the name IDEAL at NCR.

9/1/99 through 6/31/02

IDEAL at NCR operates a separate corporation as a business resource group with Steve Jacobs serving as president.

7/1/02

In preparation for spinning-off IDEAL at NCR into IDEAL Group, at the end of 2002, IDEAL Group is first incorporated as an Ohio not-for-profit corporation.

12/31/02

Steve Jacobs retires from NCR Corporation, spins-off IDEAL at NCR into IDEAL Group, Inc. and assumes responsibility for all IDEAL at NCR commercial commitments, clients and business contracts.

6/1/03

IDEAL Group is re-incorporated as a for-profit corporation.

1/1/04

IDEAL Group forms a subsidiary company to handle requests for plain English development tools. The name of the new company is StyleWriter Development Group, Inc.

6/1/04

IDEAL Group forms a second subsidiary company to manage its online conferencing and collaboration contracts.  The name of the new company is Online Conferencing Systems Group, Inc.

2/1/08

IDEAL Group forms a third subsidiary company, InftyReader Group, Inc., to market what it considered to be the most powerful and advanced math accessibility program in the world. InftyReader is an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) application that recognizes and translates scientific documents (including math symbols) into LaTeX, MathML and XHTML!