Customer case
Archie digitally accessible to the blind and visually impaired
As many as 70 percent of people with visual impairments are unemployed at home. And that while many are highly educated and have much to offer. Fortunately, Gea Weersma does have a job, with the municipality of Veenendaal. When the municipality put out a tender in the market for CRM software, one hard requirement was that it should also be accessible to the blind and visually impaired. The choice fell on Archie CRM.
The benefits of working with Archie
Mouseless operation
Easily navigable
Good integration with screen reader
About municipality of Veenendaal
The municipality of Veenendaal is a place for entrepreneurs. The wool and cigar factories have given way to industries such as ICT, transportation, technology, retail, services and manufacturing. The Economy Department maintains relations with these entrepreneurs and ensures a good business climate.
Municipality
Industry
553 FTE
Company size
Netherlands
Location
Relationship Management
Use cases
Archie CRM
Product
Gea Weersma works as an account manager in the Economics Department. In this role, among other things, she plans appointments for aldermen, organizes company visits for the college and ensures that the customer database is up to date. To facilitate this work, the municipality issued a request for a new CRM system in 2022. Because Weersma has a visual impairment, it was a hard requirement that the software be operable via hotkeys and auditory support.
"I can control Archie completely via hotkeys."
Gea Weersma, account manager Economy at municipality of Veenendaal
Of the four CRM vendors shortlisted, Archie was the only one that could meet this requirement.
Weersma: "Archie has an interface that also works via keyboard shortcuts and is also semantic. This means that the software integrates optimally with Jaws, the screen reading software I use. After all, screen reading software cannot read text in pictures, but you can build your software underwater so that the text in pictures can still be read."
When she starts Archie in the morning, Weersma does not use the mouse, but a hotkey. She then automatically enters the last relationship card she opened. From there, she can search by company name or street name. If multiple companies are found, she can scroll through them using the arrow keys, with Jaws reading out the company names. The moment the right company comes to mind, she enters that company's relation card via the tab key.
All relationship data centrally findable
After a pilot at the Economy Department with eleven employees, more organizational units at Veenendaal Municipality are now eager to start working with Archie. Weersma is not surprised: "In Archie you can archive all contacts that have been made with a company, from telephone calls and e-mails to reports of company visits. Anyone who wants to contact a company can see at a glance what other contacts there have already been. This makes you better prepared if you are going to make a call or plan a company visit. It is also much easier to take over each other's work if, for example, a colleague is sick or on vacation."
Once a month there is an automatic update with the latest Chamber of Commerce information. "So when we move house or start a new company, we don't have to change the data ourselves. Only when a contact person changes do we have to manually update the data," says Weersma.
Become digitally accessible
She does not understand why so few companies still make an effort to make their websites and their own applications digitally accessible for people with disabilities. "A quarter of all Dutch people have a disability to varying degrees that makes it more difficult for them to work digitally. If you look at the group with a visual impairment, there are more than 300,000 blind and visually impaired people, supplemented by another 700,000 people who are color-blind and therefore often have trouble reading the text in buttons and bars. If companies would just start making their Web sites accessible to this group, that would already make a huge difference. It would also give them better findability on Google, because Google is also blind."
This requires that Web sites be built semantically. That means that the text in images underwater is visible to Google and to speech software or software that magnifies texts. The fact that not all Web sites and applications are semantic yet is mostly due to ignorance. People think it is difficult, expensive or time-consuming. And yet so much is possible, such as having texts read out loud or magnified. Do you want to make your business more digitally accessible? Then Weersma's Oog voor Iedereen foundation can help you do just that.
Just take a seat behind the wheel!
Are you curious to see what Archie looks like when it's set up for your business? Do you want to know what is unique about the most user-friendly CRM for the municipality? Then sign up for a 10-minute demo.
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