News Deaf people calling for better telephone access
“Deaf telecoms not yet in the 21st Century”, says TAG
The Government was accused today of letting down deaf and hard-of-hearing citizens by failing to enable them to have access to modernised, fairly-priced telecom services suited to their needs.
While an everyday part of hearing people’s lives since the 1960s, poor access to the telephone severely affects the lives and life chances of deaf and hard-of-hearing people.
New-style services which enable deaf people to use the phone have been available for several years and are used widely in countries like America and Australia. These services have appeared in the UK, but only two remain as the others have been forced to close through a lack of funding.
TAG, which represents all the UK’s main deaf and hard-of-hearing organisations concerned with electronic communications, is today encouraging deaf people to take a one-off opportunity to use two telephone services adapted to their needs to lobby their MPs and call for policies that will bring deaf telecoms in Britain into the 21st Century.
Today’s event marks the start of TAG’s campaign ‘Bringing Deaf Telecoms into the 21st
Century’.
Ruth Myers, chair of TAG, said: “Four decades after telephones became commonplace in British
households, many deaf and hard-of-hearing people still struggle to use the telephone network and
some cannot use it at all. They are bereft of key telephone services that could help them gain
equality with the rest of society, educationally and professionally.
“New types of phone relay systems using technologies like video communications and the
Internet can dramatically improve telecommunications for deaf people, but the powers-that-be
are dragging their feet in enabling their use by deaf and hard-of-hearing people at an affordable
price. This is discrimination and an infringement of our human rights. Such services are already
available at no extra cost in countries such as Sweden, the USA and Australia.”
To start the lobby of MPs, sign language users are expected to inundate one of the two remaining UK-based video relay services. A few other deaf people have been given a one-off chance to use a captioned relay service in the USA to contact their MPs –last December, the captioned relay service that operated in the UK closed.
Sign language users will communicate with their MPs on a phone via an interpreter and a system called video relay, while others will use captioned relay to talk to their MP using their own voice and reading the MP’s reply in text on-screen almost as soon as he or she speaks.
Ruth Myers added: “All deaf and hard-of-hearing people are asking for is to be able to use
technology that already exists at a fair price. We want to keep pace with technology. We want
equality in education, training, the workplace and as consumers and citizens in the information
society.”
TAG is a consortium made up of the British Deaf Association, LINK, National Association of
Deafened People, National Deaf Children’s Society, Deaf Broadcasting Council, Royal
Association in Aid of Deaf People, Deafness Support Network, Royal Association in Aid of Deaf
People, Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID), deafPLUS, Scottish Council on
Deafness, Hearing Concern and Sense.
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