Disabled Voices: The Accessibility Case for Online Chat
Customers with hearing, visual, physical, and cognitive disabilities need more support.
When Katie wanted to handle a package claim with a well known national shipping company, the first thing she did was visit their website on her phone. She tapped around, looking for help, and finally found it — a phone number. For some, this might be a relief, but for Katie this was disheartening. Katie has sensorineural bilateral severe to profound hearing loss, in other words, she is hard of hearing. She wears hearing aids and uses lip-reading to understand what people are saying.
The company did not provide email or chat support, so it required her to ask a 3rd party to contact the company’s support line to help her with this personal matter. Accessibility is about autonomy. The freedom to do what you need to, without requiring assistance.
For people who are HoH (hard of hearing) and Deaf, phone support is a barrier when that is the only option. As we all know, the quality of phone support varies greatly! Sometimes (rarely) you’ are immediately connected to a support rep. Most of the time you have to go through automated prompts, which are sometimes touch-tone — and other times they ask you to actually speak your request into the phone to get through the maze of options. If the automated system has fuzzy or…
