And we all know I like tormenting things until they agree to be accessible. Or developers until they agree to make things that way. I wrote a while back I was trying to get my foot in the door with Davis and Henderson, a financial services company by the looks of it with an office in Ottawa. After going last week without much in the way of an actual response, I finally got one this morning. Or rather, I called and pried one out of the HR contact I’ve been trying to deal with. What it boils down to from where I sit is blindness technology doesn’t play nice with their choice of phone technology. This, naturally, from supposedly the mouth of the guy or guys who’re supposedly trying to convince the two to play nice together. And filtered through at least two people I’m aware of, so something probably got lost in translation.
HR chicky wasn’t exactly very forthcoming with the details, even on a non-technical level, except to say the phone system they use is a Cisco one–I’m assuming that includes whatever softphone application(s) they’re using, but that’s a guess on my part. The only thing I pulled out of her was the screenreader won’t work with it–which, yeah, I got when she told me they were having problems with it. I nudged her in the direction of putting me in touch with the person or persons behind the attempt to get things to play nice with each other, and I get the impression she’s going to at least make the attempt to filter my contact info up the chain to where it needs to go. I’m not holding my breath on it getting anywhere, naturally, but if it doesn’t I’m not entirely sure I can justifiably be pissed at her. Which, at end of day, means for the immediate future any plans I had on a return to Ottawa are kind of going in that other direction. But, I now have what I might call a halfway attempt at an accessibility project to work on. Assuming the phone rings between now and before I forget I ever had any dealing with the company in question. Now to wait until later this week, when I can give a few friendly shoves in the right direction to the other employment project I’ve got cooking. And maybe, barring complications, apply a liberal amount of education to an Ottawa company. I should hang out and not do much more often–productivity happens that way.
Update: That didn’t take long. My HR contact’s supervisor just called and seems not quite opposed to the idea of me working with them on this. Thus slightly increasing the chances I’ll actually get to speak with someone who’s involved in the process. This should be wicked interesting, if nothing else. Small progress is, after all, still small progress. Particularly considering I’m apparently not the first person to try and apply there in my current situation. We shall see what happens.