Accessible Telephony in the UK just got a whole lot easier.

The week of October 20, 2009, Tenacity and DLX Networks have teamed up to promote accessible communications solutions in the United Kingdom. These solutions are designed to assist individuals in securing and maintaining jobs while helping employers with securing and maintaining a diverse work force, reducing turnover due to inadequate and/or inaccessible work environments and compliance with the current regulations set forth by the Disability Discrimination Act of 2005 and the Communications Act of 2003.

Tenacity is responsible for developing the solution while DLX Networks and their cadre of highly skilled engineers will be responsible for deploying and maintaining the solutions in the UK area. In addition to improving workplace accessibility in the area of telephony, DLX Networks, a Certified Cisco Premier Partner, offers an entire suite of solutions. You can view more information by visiting the link below.

http://www.dlxnetworks.co.uk/solutions/accessibility-solutions

Cut costs while following the law.

Since it is the law to either have a TTY machine available or deploy equipment that supports TTY machines, why not save money doing it? Almost every organization that has deployed TTY machines, has them setup with analog phone lines. There is a reoccurring cost associated with every analog line; the cost to maintain and lease the line from the phone company. Analog lines cost an average of about $30 per line per month. If your organization has 10 TTY’s deployed, the cost could be surprising.

ipTTY – a particular flavor of accessaphone – allows an organization to get rid of the analog lines that are connected to TTY machines because the soft TTY application does not require an analog line or voice modem for that matter. The application simply connects directly to the VoIP/Hybrid PBX as long as the phone system supports 3rd party SIP devices. Additionally, Telecom Managers can realize a quicker ROI for their purchased phone system because of this newly found use of SIP.

Who says accessibility can’t save an organization money?

Dustin Armstrong
dustin@accessaphone.com
www.accessaphone.com

Are enterprise phones really accessible?

Phones are accessible right? Who doesn’t know how to pick up a receiver to answer a call, push the appropriate buttons to dial the call or place the receiver back on the base station to hang up a call? Does that mean the phones are accessible? Yes, phones do come with a raised bump on the five key but shouldn’t there be more?

What if you are someone who has trouble pressing those keys on the dial pad because of some special physical need? What if you are someone with vision loss and want to know something as simple as who the person is calling you, what missed calls you have or if you have any voice mails? What if you simply just had trouble figuring out how to transfer a call?

Since the phone is an important tool in any office environment, I would like to see more of a push to make this device more accessible to all. There is a solution available now that helps people accomplish the above scenarios and it is called accessaphone™.

Help me establish awareness regarding enterprise phones and the enhanced accessibility and usability now available with accessaphone™. Also, I would be very interested in your own personal experiences regarding features/functionality that might be missing from your enterprise phone.

Dustin Armstrong

dustin@accessaphone.com
www.accessaphone.com

About accessaphone: accessaphone is growing in popularity in the workplace. For instance, for the vision impaired employee, the application speaks letting them know who is calling, how many missed calls they have and when they have a voice mail. If the individual has a mobility impairment, through the use of accessaphone, the employee now can control his/her enterprise phone via voice commands using industry standard voice recognition software. accessaphone is compatible with several enterprise phone systems.

You want this access ramp where?

Technology is improving at a rapid pace; improving for who you might ask? In many cases, every month, many technology manufacturers race to release tools and solutions with a continuously expanding feature set. Solutions facilitating the convergence of voice and data are at the forefront of this movement to increase features because you see it is their product features that play a huge role in product differentiation. To them, their features set their solutions apart from competitors.

Along with these advances in technology comes complexity. It is a delicate balancing act to provide robust features that rely on complex technology to work and an easy to use interface to control it. Add the common situation where an entity supports multiple phone systems in the organization and now you have multiple interfaces to learn and support as well as multiple training programs, if the entity provides training on the phone at all.

What if company phone systems all shared the same interface, with built in accessibility and usability features that enable every employee to communicate how they want to using the phone – with voice, video and/or real time text? Each individual employee could use the enterprise phone system, available to all employees, without the need for a special accommodation. accessaphone fulfills the need for a single interface to multiple phone systems adding accessible, usable call control for every employee on the system. The alternative, which is creating a custom solution for each employee essentially equates to placing an access ramp to each employees individual office versus the entire building. That is what essentially happens when an organization decides to “accommodate” a few individuals with customized solutions. Crazy right? Then why do we continue to accommodate when it comes to telephony? The mindset clearly needs to change.

What do you face at your office? Does the Information Technology or Phone department provide and support a non-standard phone for you? Are there co-workers who would like to have what you have but do not qualify for it or are reluctant to ask for it? Let me know.

Dustin Armstrong
dustin@accessaphone.com