Call Center for the Blind

A call center which will only employ blind persons had opened here in the Philippines last October 20, 2009 at the ATRIEV's Training Center for the Blind in Quezon City. The project will be presented at the APEC Conference in Singapore in the mid of November 2009.


This will help disabled people to cross the digital genre. The call center facility will have 8 training rooms, 3 desks alloted for outbound calls, adaptive hardware, and customized software that will assist the needs and abilities of a blind. This is called "refreshable Braille" which allows totally blind individuals to provide customer assistance while listening to the client on the phone and reading the responses in Braille. At present, there are 6 totally blind, low vision, and sighted graduates who are being taught as trainors in Taipei, Taiwan where the headquarters of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and Digital Opportunity Center (ADOC) was located. The call center is a project of the Adaptive Technology for Rehabilitation, Integration, and Empowerment of the Visually Impaired (ATRIEV) Inc. and ADOC granted the funds for the feature. ATRIEV is a business that pioneered in computer training for the blind in the country. The Resources for the Blind, National Council on Disability Affairs, Philippine National School for the Blind, and the Department of Education also helped in this activity. This organization also offered IT-related training for the unsighted in the last 15 years. They use a "screen reader", a software application that converts text to speech and provides screen magnification. On-the-job training (by using voicemail transcription) is also provided by ADOC to its qualified IT-related training graduates, in partnership with Gallop IT Solutions, a local transcription company. [via gmanews.tv]