I couldn’t agree more. I worked for four years in a call center before they shut down the whole place at the end of February, not to return again. That was announced in November or December, so, I doubt the pandemic had a lot to play in it. I ended up doing it with pretty much no Jaws scripting, and I think pure luck is what got me by a lot. At least the major program where I’d update and change things on people’s accounts was web-based, and you could run it separate from the large customer relations program, which basically was a container for everything, gave suggested talking points and instructions, and was a place to put notes, probably among other back-end things upstream. That thing was all 100 percent Jaws cursoring, for the most part, but luckily what I needed was near the bottom. The phone program was a matter of labeling graphics, but it would only respond to braille routing buttons. I had a braille display because there were disclosures to read exactly. Things became a mess when they changed the customer relations software to not allow the Jaws cursor any more. Although there were more places you could tab, it was over 40 total, and I couldn’t read what was at the bottom I needed to hit next on, or do what with. Luck had it that they didn’t give up on me, but eventually got approval for me to forego that part, and just put the notes in the web-based system.

I think part of the challenge is that voc rehab is funny about having to bring in people from out of state; they don’t really want to do it. The assistive tech person they did have didn’t think anything at all could’ve been done, but I doubt they knew much about scripting. Another thing is that the company I worked for was actually what one would call a business process outsourcing company, so, they get contracts to support other companies, and we work for this company. That means that they don’t likely have the abilities to control what software and solutions are used, and the accessibility of them. I think this could be smoother if one worked with a company who has a call center for their own products, but that’s just my somewhat educated opinion. With the way VR works, getting them to come back in as the accessibility targets move might not be the way about it.