Blindness no barrier to employment at Polish call centre

WARSAW — The steady hum of chatter and the clickety-clack of computer keyboards makes it sound like any other call centre but at this Warsaw market research firm, blindness is no barrier to employment.The operation runs so smoothly that people on the other end of the phone line have no idea that they're dealing with the visually impaired.And thanks to new technology, the job gets done without a hitch."When you click on an icon, the computer tells you what it is. A sighted person can read it while we can hear it," employee Lukasz Chmielewski told AFP.Set up last year, the small firm called Quality Cube has 15 employees including 12 who are blind, expanding -- if minimally -- the limited pool of jobs for the visually impaired in Poland."These people are the best employees," said company co-founder Marcin Gic. "They are the most loyal. They never take sick days or take a day off because they partied too much the night before, so it's very positive."Gic sees Quality Cube as a "real business", not a charity. He concedes it took some investment to adapt the office to the needs of blind employees but said it was well worth it and expects to turn a profit next year.Initially, he planned to allow the blind to work from home via Internet "but it turned out that employees prefer to work here in our office," Gic said.Typical was Pawel Urbanski, 29, a quality control expert and consultant at Quality Cube who specialises in matching business projects and applied technologies."Having to get out into the city every day, take a bus, walk the streets, it really gets you motivated and makes for a refreshing change," said Urbanski, who lost his sight at 13 but went on to study in Poland and abroad.Though employment and education for disabled is improving in Poland, it is an uphill battle. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development singled out the former communist state, in 2006, as "far below the OECD average" for employing the disabled and urged reforms.Five years later, the situation for the visually impaire

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