Accessibility in contact center: what it actually looks like for VCC Live users

We sat down with Szerencsejáték Zrt’s three visually impaired colleagues, Réka, Angi, and Szabolcs, along with their team leader Fatime, to learn what it’s actually like to work in a contact center when you navigate entirely by ear, or by a screen magnified to the point where one Excel column fills half a monitor. All three are part of the outbound campaign team at Szerencsejáték Zrt, Hungary’s state lottery operator, which proudly employs around 170 people with reduced working capacity across its operations.

The project started in 2025, when Szerencsejáték Zrt set out to understand what type of customer service work could realistically be done by visually impaired employees, and whether their software was ready for the task. The Informatikai a Látássérültekért Alapítvány (Foundation for IT for the Visually Impaired) spent several days auditing every system in use, including both VCC Live Desk and VCC Live 360 Agent, producing a detailed study. Most things already worked. The rest went straight onto the development roadmap.

How they actually use the software 

Szabolcs and Angi, who navigate the world without sight, use JAWS, one of the most widely used screen reader programs, to which Szabolcs also has a compact Bluetooth keyboard he’s had for two years. “Not Braille,” he clarifies. “Just a regular Logitech. I would be fine without it too, but I’m used to this keyboard, know where everything is, so I can use shortcuts and combinations easily.” 

Réka, who is partially sighted, uses the Windows built-in magnifier, which enlarges the screen to whatever size she needs.

Other than the above, they don’t use any special software or tooling – just the same kind of laptops as their colleagues. And the same contact center software: VCC Live. This is exactly why the quality and accessibility of software matter so much.

Accessibility is especially tricky when it comes to partially sighted users.

“There’s no such thing as ‘the visually impaired user.’ Blind is uniform: none of us can see. But low vision means something different for every person. You can’t generalize a single accessibility fix that works for everyone.”

Réka is a clear example of this. Her setup works well for her: Windows magnifier, two screens, copy-pasting phone numbers from Excel into VCC Live 360 Agent, dialing with Enter. Clean, fast, manageable. But a project that required launching an IVR prompt at the end of every call created a real problem: the button lived in the bottom-right corner of the interface, and with a magnifier active, that’s a long way from the dial button.

Spatial proximity isn’t typically a top priority that comes up in accessibility discussions. It should be.

“The desktop version just said ‘button’“

Angi has used VCC Live Desk before (in a previous contact center job in 2016). She also encountered a different deployment of the same platform more recently, at another employer, and found it close to unusable with her screen reader.

“A visual update (which is often necessary, good, needed)  can completely break things for a screen reader user without anyone noticing,” she explains. “For example, every button suddenly just reads as ‘button.’ You have no idea what anything does.”

She arrived at Szerencsejáték Zrt to find that VCC Live had, within roughly a year, gone from that experience to something she describes as genuinely accessible. 

“I have a comparison point. I know how it was before, and I know what it became. And I’m really grateful I get to work like this.”

For Angi, being able to work with accessible software means more than just a faster workflow. “I can say this on behalf of all three of us that I’m truly grateful that I can be useful not just for Szerencsejáték Zrt but at a societal level too. The people we call are usually genuinely grateful.”

The platform they currently use is VCC Live 360 Agent, our browser-based interface. Angi gives us an example of why she prefers the new platform: the desktop version labelled buttons generically (rendering it unusable for visually impaired users), but the browser version labels them descriptively. For a screen reader user, that’s the difference between knowing what you’re doing and just guessing.

Finding a feature before his sighted colleagues did

Szabolcs had been using VCC Live for exactly one week when a colleague mentioned wanting to replay a recorded call. Nobody at the table could remember how to find it.

“I told them: you know you can search calls by phone number, right? Filter by inbound or outbound?” His sighted colleagues hadn’t found it yet. “I found it because I was curious. I just went looking.”

He’s honest about the tradeoff: mapping an interface by keyboard takes longer upfront than scanning it visually. But once that map is built, things move fast. Both Réka and Angi say their customers rarely notice any difference in their pace.

Angi puts it plainly: “We’ll never be as fast as a sighted colleague with years of routine, simply because, well, they can see what they’re doing. That’s just a fact. But we’re more precise. Slower, maybe. But more attentive.” 

When things don’t work

When something doesn’t work, the team flags it to Kinga, their main point of contact on the VCC Live side, who escalates quickly to the customer success team. Angi describes one issue she’d been wrestling with for an hour:

“Before I’d even finished writing the issue to Kinga, she’d already screenshotted it, sent it to VCC Live support, and ten minutes later it was solved. That kind of responsiveness and caring speaks volumes about how responsive the VCC Live team really is”

Being human is evergreen

A lot of the calls Réka, Angi, and Szabolcs make go to older customers. People who are happy to talk. Réka says she can hear it in their voices.

“I genuinely think this kind of work shouldn’t be fully automated,” she says. “You can hear that they’re glad someone called. A real person, not a recording that just plays an automated message”

While Szerencsejáték Zrt uses a growing number of AI features within the VCC Live 360 software, they know that finding the balance between human and AI is what makes them a truly great organization. 

What’s next for the team

The next phase for the team will include handling templated emails, which will bring its own accessibility questions: how speech recognition and AI-assisted features interact with screen readers is something worth getting right before anyone opens a ticket queue. 

What we learnt is that accessibility in the contact center (or anywhere, really) can’t be treated as a one-time, set-and-forget project. It’s an ongoing process, and the best way to get it right is to ask the people who depend on it every day.