History of IDEAL Group, Inc. and its Subsidiary Companies
Updated on May 7, 2012
Introduction:
Individuals with Disabilities Enabling Advocacy Group (IDEAL) Group was incorporated, as a not-for-profit organization, in 1991. IDEAL’s business objective was to facilitate and support the hiring of core-competent individuals with disabilities by AT&T. Today, there are active chapters of IDEAL at AT&T http://www.att.com/, Lucent Technologies (now Alcatel-Lucent) http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/wps/portal, NCR Corporation http://ncr.com, Avaya http://avaya.com and Teradata http://www.teradata.com/t/.
Background:
In 1989, Darren Kall, distinguished member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Labs (currently senior director global experience design at LexisNexis) formed what came to be known as AT&T’s Employee Technical Advisory Panel (ETAP). When Darren joined AT&T in 1988, he discovered that designing accessible products and services was not a unified effort across the company. While AT&T had advisory groups, they were primarily focused on accessibility policy, not technology.
In 1990, Darren organized a small group of AT&T employees, many of whom were engineers with disabilities, interested in promoting the hiring of core-competent individuals with disabilities. Founding members of the group included Betsy Dixon, Manager, Workforce Diversity and Inclusion at AT&T (still holds that position), Jim Kutsch, VP, Computing & Network Services at AT&T Universal Card Services, (currently President and CEO at The Seeing Eye and Chairman at National Industries for the Blind) and Steve Jacobs, Chairman, AT&T Project Freedom (Past President of IDEAL at NCR Corporation and Currently President of IDEAL Group, Inc.).
Individuals with Disabilities Enabling Advocacy Group (IDEAL) at AT&T was established and incorporated in New Jersey, as a not-for-profit organization. IDEAL operated as an all volunteer, employee led, organization focused on hiring, mentoring, supporting and paving the way to promoting 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.
From 1992-1994 Steve served as Chairman of AT&T Project Freedom. Steve’s group pioneered the use of interactive video technology for sign-language communications over telephone lines (dual ISDNs). This technology, now in the mainstream, is referred to as Video Relay Services (VRS). http://ideal-group.org/ivr/
In September of 1995 AT&T announced that it was planning a divestiture and was 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 was spun off from AT&T in October 1996 and NCR in December of 1996.
In 1996, Jacobs was named President of IDEAL at NCR.
In 1999, Jacobs and NCR's Chief Legal Council reincorporated IDEAL at AT&T under the name IDEAL at NCR, and Jacobs was named President.
At the end of December, 2002, after 20+ years of service, Jacobs retired from NCR and spun-off IDEAL Group, Inc. from IDEAL at NCR Corporation into a not-for-profit organization. In 2002 IDEAL Group was reincorporated as a for profit corporation.
Currently, IDEAL Group serves as the parent of six, information and communications technology access-focused, companies. They are as follows:
Online Conferencing Systems Group,
Inc.
http://onlineconferencingsystems.com
Established: January, 2003
Online Conferencing Systems Group offers fully-accessible,
508-compliant, online conferencing and distance-learning services,
systems and support. Every month thousands of people from every corner
of the world use IDEAL Conference to meet, participate in, and deliver
accessible webinars.
InftyReader Group, Inc.
http://inftyreader.org
Established: March, 2007
InftyReader, a sophisticated optical character recognition application,
is used by thousands of universities around the world to recognize,
convert, and enable the editing of math documents into accessible
formats in support of students with print disabilities. Converted
formats include LaTeX, MathML, Human Readable TeX, and Word XML.
EasyCC, Inc.
http://easycc.org
Established: June, 2008
EasyCC is a telecommunications company that supports people with hearing
impairments, individuals with mobility disabilities and consumers with
print disabilities. From conferences and classrooms to the corporate
world, EasyCC cost-effectively delivers real-time text streaming
services that are accessible on any platform, including mobile devices.
EasyCC’s infrastructure provides the ability to generate captions using
speech recognition technology.
Apps4Android, Inc.
http://apps4android.org
Established: January, 2009
Apps4Android is the world’s
largest developer of open source Android accessibility applications with
Onymous Heroes, Inc.
http://onymousheroes.com
Acquired: July, 2010
Onymous Heroes develops
Android utilities, browsers, application installers, image animation
applications and much more. Onymous has
Easy Access, Inc.
http://easy-access.org
Established: October, 2011
Easy Access, a joint venture between Apps4Android, Inc. and Accessible
Systems India is focused on developing document conversion and reading
applications that address the access needs of individuals with print
disabilities. See:
http://tinyurl.com/6xed4mk
Today, IDEAL Group, along with its subsidiary companies, continues to enhance the independence, quality-of-life, employability, and educations of millions of individuals with disabilities in 136 countries.