Making services more accessible to people living with disabilities

Achance encounter with a mother struggling to take out life insurance for her deaf daughter sparked a business idea in a call centre agent back in 2007.

About 16 years later, the fullyfledged idea is making life much more bearable for people living with disabilities.

The compassionate call centre agent was Claybourne Appies, the founder of DeafTouch.

Founded in 2018, DeafTouch is a video-based digital call centre platform that promotes digital inclusion for people with disabilities. The platform allows effective communication between the deaf and people with visual disabilities, businesses, governments and the general public.

Speaking to Vuk’uzenzele, Appies said: “One day I received a call from a mom who wanted to take out insurance for her daughter. We were the eighth insurance she had called at the time because no one wanted to insure her deaf daughter as a policyholder. The challenge was the communication between the insurance company and the daughter.”

In a normal situation, he said, signing up for a new policy would take him about 20 minutes, but this specific scenario took him five days to complete due to the language barrier.

Taken aback by this reality,

Appies identified a need for an improved communication platform that would allow the deaf community to gain access to more services.

“Effectively, if they can gain access, they can also live their lives to the fullest extent possible, much like you and I.”

Appies said DeafTouch’s core focus was promoting accessibility of services to people living with disabilities.