VoiceFoundry rolls out Amazon Connect for Vision Australia

Vision Australia works with more than 27,000 Australians who are blind or have low vision, through 28 centres located across the country, 30 clinics and outreach programs.

Established in 2004, Vision Australia was looking for a contact centre solution that would provide the same experience, functionality and business tools to blind, low vision and sighted agents to service customers.

Moreover, it needed to be simple, accessible and available from any location.

Cloud-based contact centre Amazon Connect, from Amazon Web Services (AWS), was chosen as the core technology as its APIs provide the flexibility to easily adapt agent tools to cater for their vision impaired staff.

A key design point was the ability to interface with Job Access with Speech (JAWS) screen reading technology.

AWS's Accessible Agent Desktop includes compatibility to ZoomText Magnifier – a screen magnification application –, functional shortcodes, interfaces to Salesforce and Microsoft's Active Directory.

“Our aim in the contact centre is to have tools that will enable us to employ the best person for the role," said Matthew Staniforth, national contact centre manager at Vision Australia.

"This should be without regard to their ability to be able to commute to one of our sites within Australia or their level of sight. The only way for us to achieve this is to have accessible agent and supervisor workspaces that can be accessed remotely and securely.”

Cloud-based enterprise contact centre solutions provider VoiceFoundry partnered with the Vision Australia team to design, build and test the contact centre, with particular focus on the Accessible Agent Desktop.

According to VoiceFoundry, working with the vision impaired was a unique experience as all traditional concepts in relation to UI design and aesthetics no longer applied. 

“This has been a true partnership with Vision Australia," said Steve Stewart, professional services director at VoiceFoundry. "It was a complex and challenging design and iterative development process that focused on meeting the specific needs of their users.  

"What made it a truly rewarding experience for the development team was knowing that the end design and implementation would have an impact on the day to day lives of those vision impaired agents.

"Our long term goal is to make this desktop available globally to any vision impaired agent that uses Amazon Connect," Stewart added.