IVR (Interactive Voice Response) + digital accessibility guidelines

Introduction:

IVR is a ‘telephony-based system’ that receives ‘your voice’ as input and provides the output as ‘a recorded voice response’. It is a common mechanism in modern days to reach out to the customer service or agents of any organization.

IVR plays a receptionist role to

1. Learn user’s needs for the call (through the menus or voice questions)

2. retrieve user specific information (example: account balance)

3. provide general information (example: location, timings)

4. connect to the respective departments (example: travel agents, billing)

IVR + Digital accessibility:

As IVR is a voice centric system, the way how it works or rely on may give few difficulties to people with hearing disability, cognitive challenges, and motor (touch interaction) challenges.

Below are the accessibility guidelines (or best practices) for the IVR systems (taken from a few reference sources):

Menu Structure

1. Greeting: The main greeting should identify the entity reached (i.e., Department of….).
2. Menus/Options: Strive to keep the number of menu items to a maximum of five. Because people cannot see the menu items, they have to work to remember the items in the list.