Case Study
Creation and design of a workplace for a courier driver

The micro-enterprise offers Europe-wide express transports and drives exclusively on behalf of a larger forwarding agency. The company has three full-time employees and two people in marginal employment. The employer plans to permanently employ or take on an employee with a severe disability who is currently still in the probationary period.

The man is deaf and cannot perceive acoustic information (e.g. speech and signals) and cannot communicate by speech. Due to his disability, acoustic information must therefore be converted and appropriate assistive products used for communication. His degree of disability (GdB) is 100 and his disability certificate contains the symbol RF.

The man is an industrial mechanic by profession and has already driven vans for several years. He has been employed as a courier driver by the employer for one month.

The driver undertakes express courier journeys in the European area with a van, including loading and unloading as required. He receives the orders electronically from the forwarding agency via a fleet management system with order scheduling. The orders are transmitted to the vehicle by radio and appear there on the display of the receiving device. Within a certain time, the transmitted orders must be accepted or acknowledged by the driver. Finished orders are deleted from the display, but are still available for later evaluation. For better route planning and orientation, a navigation system with a particularly large screen has also been installed in the vehicle so that directional instructions can be perceived more easily. In addition, the large screen enables easy operation of the system via touchscreen.
To compensate for the communication restrictions, the driver uses a smartphone with which he can communicate in writing with the employer and transmit important image information, e.g. vehicle or goods damage, by means of the camera. The smartphone has a dictation app as standard, with the help of which the employer has recorded various voice messages for the driver, which can then be used by the driver with customers at the barriers with intercoms. Using the dictation app with a visual indicator when recordings are made and the smartphone microphone when voice is received, it is also possible to visually determine when someone is speaking at the intercom. A corresponding visual indicator shows this in the app and the driver can then start his voice message.

The vehicle (incl. fleet management system equipment) for the newly created workplace and the design suitable for disabled people were funded by the integration or inclusion office. Advice was provided by the Technical Advisory Service of the Integration and Inclusion Office respectively.