FOCUS on ABILITY.

Disabled workers are ready and willing to prove themselves. Just ask them.

Could you do your job if you were blind? Deaf? In a wheelchair with limited use of your arms? Could you do the job as well?

Every day, John Good Rico Brusco, Mike Gravitt, Dan Rossi and Eric Miazga go to their technology jobs here in the city. Good and Rossi are blind, Brusco and Miazga are confined to a wheelchair as a result of cerebral palsy, and Gravitt is legally blind, but has some limited vision.

By all accounts, they are talented, productive, and confident, too.

"I'm the best programmer I've ever met," says Good, a database administration for the City of Pittsburgh's City Information Systems.

His boss, Howard Stern, agrees, saying Good is tremendously gifted. And Miazga, an Oracle programmer and Good's colleague at CIS, has a remarkable work ethic, Stern also notes.

Rossi is a software engineer at IBM Transarc Labs. "I get the same work assigned and am just as productive as anyone else in this job," he says.

Gravitt is a systems consultant at Bayer Corp., under contract from Bender Consulting Services in. Robinson Township He works on SAP software. "There is nothing I cannot do with the equipment I have."

Gravitt uses special software that enlarges the text on his computer screen among other tools. (For details on equipment, see box on opposite page.)

Despite the accomplishments of many disabled workers, despite glowing employer testimonials and despite a job market with a sharpened appetite for …