Case Study: Olmsted Center for Sight expands career opportunities and boosts graduate job placement from 70% to 82% with Avaya

Avaya Contact Center Expands Career Opportunities for Blind and Visually Impaired Agents at Olmsted Center for Sight

Olmsted Center for Sight’s Statler Career Center in Buffalo trains people who are blind or visually impaired for employment, but faced the challenge of replacing disappearing manufacturing jobs with new, marketable opportunities. To prepare graduates for the rapidly growing contact center industry the center needed robust, hands‑on telecommunications systems and specialized training so blind agents could interact with live systems and learn real‑world skills.

Avaya provided a full-featured contact center solution with accessibility applications and training, enabling practical, multimodal agent workflows (screen reading, Braille, audio). As a result Olmsted trained hundreds of agents, raised its graduate placement rate from 70% to 82%, established a commercial contact center with about 20 live contracts and 30 employees, won the western New York 2‑1‑1 contract, and created a replicable model used by other agencies — delivering measurable benefits to clients like improved appointment reminders and a 25% positive response rate on sales outreach.

Olmsted Center for Sight

Renee DiFlavio

Senior Vice President