New options ease calling for hearing-impaired - 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act guarantees handicapped equal access to facilities and services

Communications News, March, 1994 by Paul Kirvan

Years ago, when I worked for New Jersey Bell, we had a special services group that designed products for people with various physical handicaps and disabilities. This should not be a surprise, since Alexander Graham Bell specialized in teaching the hearing-impaired.

Telcos across the country responded to the needs of the disabled, often in creative ways. There were handsets with volume controls, visual lamps to denote line ringing, the Artificial Larynx for speaking, and switchboards with Braille inserts. Most of these products were primitive, compared with today's technology, but they worked.

Passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990 forced opened many previously closed doors for disabled citizens.

The law's basic guarantee is "equal access" to facilities and services normally available to those without handicaps. This is espeically important when the subject is telecommunications.

Voice communications requires the ability to hear. If one is hearing-impaired or deaf in today's world, one uses a Telephone Device for the Deaf, or TDD. The successful use of TDDs has been in large part due to the ADA.

New products are helping companies comply with ADA. In particular, there's one which should greatly improve the communications process between the hearing-impaired and people with normal hearing.

Consider with Brian Berman, president of DemoSource (Northridge, Calif., 800-283-4759); and Martin Zary, products marketing manager with Dialogic, Inc. (Parsippany, N.J., 201-334-8450) are doing with a product called TDDMail.

TDDs are special phones that incorporate a standard typewriter key board, alphanumeric display, and an acoustic coupler and/ or standard RJ-11 jack for network connections. To set up a "conversation," one TDD user takes a phone, inserts it into the acoustic coupler (or directly via RJ-11), and dials an individual with a TDD. The receiving unit flashes a visual signal t get the other's attention. The receiving individual connects his/her TDD unit to the call. Finally, the two communicate by typing messages on their keyboards.

This is OK if both are TDD users. But what if the receiving end is someone with normal hearing? Typically a "relay" is established. The TDD user calls a special center, and is connected to a TDD. At the center, the person working relay communicates with the caller via TDD, then contacts the caller's desired party, and "relays" the message back and fourth to the called party.

Let's take this one more step. What would happen to a TDD user trying to call into a voice mail system, or a voice response unit (VRC) connected to a computer-based system, e.g., a catalog ordering application?

Until recently, there would be no way for a TDD user to properly interact with the remote application. The application requires an interface to translate its unique human-interface command set into TDD messages.

Enter DemoSource and TDDMail. According to Berman, whose company sells voice mail applications based on Dialogic components, he was inspired to develop the product because his son is hearing-impaired. "There are many hearing-impaired people who need access to services that a TDD, by itself, does not provide," he says.

TDDMail provides a "front-end" to a voice mail or similar voice processing system so TDD users can communicate with it. According to Berman, "The intelligence of voice mail systems is inversely proportional for their price."

It is not uncommon, he says, for users in a large voice mail system to get lost, with no way to get back to a system menu, or a live operator.

"We place the emphasis on making our systems idiot-proof," he says. "And this is especially true with the hearing-impaired." Currently there are over 50 users.

Interesting developments are in the works for the hearing-impaired. Berman says one example involves video technologies. The idea is to convert TDD messages into video by translating the TDD signal into American Sign Language hand sign icons as messages are entered. The icons are then superimposed on a video screen, similar to closed captions.

A useful book describing the ADA's provisions in plain English is Complying With the Americans With Disabilities Act, by Don Fersh and Peter W. Thomas, Esq., published by Quorum Books, Westport, Conn.

Stupid term of the month: "Outyear," used in government procurement to denote a year that is at least three to five years in the future. Submitted by John Dominicis, who works in contracting for (where else?) the government in northern Virginia.