Jason Mitschele stands outside the courtroom in a close huddle with a fellow prosecutor and a defence lawyer, working out the details of a plea. A woman, 34, had been arrested selling crack to an undercover police officer.

Mitschele’s guide dog, Kailua, sits between the three men, ruffling their judicial robes when she shifts her weight.

The defence counsel reads the details of the charge a single time and Mitschele commits it all to memory. Half an hour later, he’s standing before a judge, Kailua by his side, running through the entire sequence of events — the exact dates, exact addresses, exact times down to the minute — without faltering.

Mitschele is blind. For over a decade he has worked for the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, primarily on drug cases.

“No one ever said I couldn’t do it,” he said.

And he has earned the respect of his peers.

“Jason has this amazing ability to recall the facts of a case, the relevant legal principles and case law,” said fellow PPSC prosecutor Hafeez Amarshi. “I remember discussing a tricky legal issue with him and he was able to cite the relevant case right down to the paragraph number (even though) the case he was referring to was something like six years old and over 30 pages.”

Mitschele has Kailua, and before that, had Boris the guide dog. And he has text-to-voice technology that reads documents to him, a paralegal dedicated to assisting him and, he said, lawyers and judges are generally pretty understanding.

“(Law) is an adversarial system but it’s a cordial one,” he said.

But, as a visually-impaired person working in his chosen profession, Mitschele is a rarity.

The employment rate for visually-impaired Canadians of working age is just 38 per cent, compared with just over 60 per cent for the population at large.

“We go out, we get an education and then we come out of education and when we want a job there’s no job to be had,” said Diane Bergeron, an executive director at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, who is totally blind herself.

This month, in honour of National Disability Employment Awareness Month, the CNIB has launched a campaign to topple common misconceptions about visually impaired people in the workplace.

Dubbed EmployAbility, the campaign features a series of PSA videos starring real visually impaired workers.

The CNIB says there are half a million people in Canada with some form of vision loss, over 100,000 of whom are of working age.

They represent a largely untapped resource, says the CNIB. They find — or look for — a wide variety of jobs. Lawyer. Fitness trainer. Cancer researcher.

In a recent poll by the market research firm Ipsos, 70 per cent of Canadians surveyed said that, if faced with two equally qualified job applicants, they would hire the sighted one over the visually impaired one.

When Statistics Canada released a report based on its 2012 Survey on Disabilities, 55 per cent of visually impaired people reported feeling that employers saw them as “disadvantaged.”

Ten to 14 per cent of visually impaired respondents said they believed they had been refused jobs, interviews or promotions because of their vision.

Scarborough native Arvin Carandang says he’s experiencing that inequity first-hand.

The aspiring physical trainer has Leber congenital amaurosis, an eye disorder that left him with five per cent vision.

He graduated from Algonquin College in June with a diploma in Fitness and Health Promotion, and has received accreditation from the CanFitPro national certification program.

“Arvin is a gem,” said Cindy Bradley, one of Carandang’s professors from Algonquin College.

“He lives with such purpose to really get the most out of what he decides to be involved in. If he was hired as a trainer these qualities would really be motivating to who he serves and his authenticity as a great guy would be contagious.”

But Carandang has gone jobless while many of his classmates have found employment.

He said it’s a “very real possibility” that his vision impairment is what has kept him from finding work in his field.

“I was thinking I was going to be able to get a job just as easily as my classmates (because) I did very well in the program,” he said.

Carandang can generally see enough to judge his clients’ workout technique if he stands close enough. When he needs a better look, he will ask their permission to take video of their work out, then slow the footage down and maybe blow it up on his iPad or laptop.

But, said Carandang, employers likely underestimate him because of his vision loss.

“As soon as they see my cane they automatically think I can’t see anything at all,” he said. “And then when they see my certificate they’re probably wondering ‘How are you able to get that?’”

Misunderstandings about the level of ability visually impaired employees have and the amount of assistance they need to do their jobs is one of the major barriers to finding work, Bergeron said.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“A lot of people don’t understand that it really doesn’t take a whole lot of effort to have someone who is blind or partially sighted within the workforce,” she said.

“(Employers) will pick the person who’s sighted (so) they don’t have to think about accommodation.”

But with advances in technology, workplace assistance for the visually impaired is easier to access than ever.

Bergeron said most visually impaired people use text-to-voice software that reads to them whatever is on their computer screen, be it a web page, an email, a PDF or a spreadsheet.

The CNIB says popular high-end voice software for computers runs a little over $1,000, and iPhones and other smartphones come pre-loaded with voiceover options.

“Most people just need … either large print or something talking and they’re on their way,” Bergeron.

Mitschele, in his prosecutor role, uses voice-to-text software on his computer and phone, and the paralegal assigned to him types up handwritten police notes, flags important passages for him in long, printed case files, help him review evidence and more.

“Keep in mind that I work for the government (which) is a huge equity employer with budgets in place and mandates and procedures for accommodations,” Mitschele said

“I think in the private sector a lot of their bottom line is, how much is it going to cost to accommodate this person, to get them special software.”

When a job involves more than reading and writing text, the fight for accommodation becomes more difficult.

Mahadeo Sukhai is a cancer researcher who specializes in using the study of genomes to help with patient diagnosis and care at the University Health Network in Toronto.

He has a full field of vision, but can’t see detail or read small text, and he lacks muscle control over his eyes, which makes it difficult for him to focus on something for more than a few minutes without getting a terrible headache.

Most of Sukhai’s days are spent interpreting patient test results, analyzing data breaking it down to help physicians determine a personalized course of treatment for their patients — tasks he can accomplish with enlarged text and blown up images on a big computer screen.

But throughout his master’s and PhD studies in molecular biology at the University of Toronto, and his post-doctoral fellowships in cancer research, he worked in much more hands-on laboratory jobs.

“For me, hand eye coordination is not the greatest skill so surgery was out of the question, handling radioactive material was out of the question, and so being in a position where I might need to do those things, I actually needed to get help.”

Sukhai had a lab technician to assist him and found ways to combine existing technology to suit his personal needs, in one instance rigging a camera over a stage and connecting it to his laptop so he could observe surgeries via blown up video.

But it has been difficult to get his academic supervisor, now his boss at UHN, to fully grasp the challenges he faces.

“She was great. She was wonderful and absolutely wiling to deal with any and all (accommodation) issues. But the problem is she did not then, and does not now, fully understand the lived experience of blindness,” he said.

“There’s a lot of preconceptions around what people who are blind or partially sighted can or can’t do,” Sukhai added.

“But the problem with that is, the people who are making those judgments are people who are not themselves blind or partially sighted.”

It was Sukhai’s own determination and initiative to find accommodations that allowed him to succeed, he said.

Ending the stigma for visually impaired people in the workplace will take that same determination in people looking for work.

“(Change) requires a systemic evolution, not just on the mindset of employers, the mindset of educators, the mindset of parents (but) in the mindset of students themselves,” Sukhai said. “To basically say, ‘I can choose to do this. I want to do this because I like this and I know I’m going to be good at it.’”