Accessibility Everywhere

Recently I ordered a new phone from ATT. However, before talking to a live person I had to traverse their automated voice recognition phone system. What a nightmare. Imagine all the dialects they must deal with and that’s only in America. I spent more time trying to get where I wanted to go than talking to the person when I finally reached him or her.

How does this fit? Accessibility. Having opinions where you press ‘1’ for this and ‘2’ for this, is much easier and has less room for error and misunderstanding. Speech has too many variations for our current computers/software to handle.

I got to the point where if I could have, I would have switched carriers because of the poor system. It was frustrating.

At work yesterday, a co-worker had to make a call to SBC. He put his phone on speakerphone. Apparently, SBC has the same system. I never thought ‘no’ could be said so angrily.