Texperts And The Deaf Community
Whilst Texperting the other day one of the questions I received was asking “what is the easiest way for a deaf person to contact the emergency services?” I thought that would be easy to answer, but it turns out that apart from a few SMS schemes that vary from council to council (and usually come with restrictions) there isn’t a mainstream alternative to voice services.
At home there is the Typetalk service but from what I can tell this only works with landlines. If there isn’t a even simple way to contact the emergency services when out and about then obtaining other essential information is likely to be harder. For example the National Rail timetable service by text is limited and doesn’t even work on all networks. Traveline does not provide a text based service at all.
Figures show that nearly 15% of the population have some degree of deafness. Most of these conditions are mild, which is defined as “have difficulty following conversations particularly in large groups or in noisy situations”, but as anyone who has tried to make a call in a busy city centre will know trying to have a conversation even with perfect hearing is difficult enough. Any time I’m in a busy area or noisy pub I will always use SMS instead of making calls.
Reports suggest that SMS is extremely popular within the deaf community:
Text messaging has provided the deaf community with a way to overcome the geographic and linguistic barriers they often encounter in the hearing world. SMS liberates the deaf community from being tied to a TTY (a specialized text telephone) and provides a new sense of independence for the deaf community – they can carry a lightweight, easy-to-use, portable device with them anywhere in the world and communicate with anyone who also has a text messaging device. Additionally, since cell phones are so ubiquitous in today’s society, text messaging does not call attention to a disability, and best of all, it is competitively priced.
When the SMS messaging boom hit, the hard-of-hearing community made up one of the strongest facets of the movement. Text messaging allowed for a huge increase in mobility for the deaf population.
As Texperts can answer any type of question, I hope that we help the 1 in 7 people of the population with hearing difficulties to get fast and accurate information at any time of the day. During the research for this article I contacted the leading deaf charities, but due to understandable concerns about product endorsement they were unable to contribute further. As ever, though, comments are welcome and will be passed on.
