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:

In 1992 Jacobs was elected as an officer of IDEAL at AT&T and was appointed to its Board of Directors. Within a few months, in an unrelated event, Jacobs was selected to chair AT&T Global Information Solution's Project Freedom. Project Freedom pioneered the development and use of interactive video technology for sign-language communications over telephones.  This technology is now referred to Video Relay Services (VRS).  What follows is a link to a video of Project Freedom's first pilot test. 

http://www.lead-the-way.org/Horace_Mann.wmv

This 1994 video captures a gathering of students from Horace Mann Montessori School for the Deaf using American Sign Language (ASL) to communicate with each other over telephones, for the first time in history. This video also contains vintage video footage of Alexander Graham Bell.

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 January 1997, Jacobs was named President of IDEAL at NCR. With support from Mark Hurd, an NCR Vice President (now CEO of Hewlett Packard) IDEAL at NCR began serving the technology access needs of NCR customers and employees with disabilities.

Beginning with his role as Chairman of AT&T Project Freedom, Jacobs worked with a team of developers in Dundee Scotland to develop the world’s first talking ATM for the blind.  It was unveiled by the Royal Bank of Canada on October 22, 1997 at a bank branch on the corner of Bank Street and Queen Street in Ottawa, Ontario. The talking ATM was a result of concerns Chris and Marie Stark, two blind customers, raised with the bank beginning in 1984.

In 1999, Jacobs and Jon Hoak, NCR's Chief Legal Council (now Chief Legal Council at Hewlett Packard) reincorporated IDEAL at AT&T under the name IDEAL at NCR, and Jacobs was named President.