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TelecomTV - TelecomTV One - News
A consortium of deaf organisations have come together to launch a campaign to improve telecoms services for deaf people by demanding better services at affordable prices.
TAG, which represents all the main UK deaf organisations, is taking its case direct to Parliament. As part of the ‘Bringing Deaf Telecoms into the 21st Century’ campaign, TAG called on the Government and telecoms regulator Ofcom to put deaf people on to an equal footing with hearing people in their use of the telephone.
Chairman Ruth Myers said that it is pivotal that deaf people have easy and affordable access to the telephone. She said the RNID Typetalk, a text relay service from the 1990's funded entirely by BT under the Universal Service Obligation, has not been updated because there is no incentive or pressure from the government to do so.
“It’s essential that telephone services for deaf people keep pace with technology – and are available at a fair price," she added.
Deaf people are left with even less options since captioned telephony, which uses speech recognition technology to convert an operator's voice into text, closed in December for funding reasons.
Currently, they can only communicate using text relay, which are phone systems that turn speech into text and vice versa, however, it is only accessible via now-obsolete analogue phone lines, or by video relay that uses sign language interpreters via PCs, webcams or videophones.
“This is an increasing and unintended form of discrimination that must be rectified,” Member of Parliament and chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Deafness, Malcolm Bruce said.
A consortium of deaf organisations have come together to launch a campaign to improve telecoms services for deaf people by demanding better services at affordable prices.
TAG, which represents all the main UK deaf organisations, is taking its case direct to Parliament. As part of the ‘Bringing Deaf Telecoms into the 21st Century’ campaign, TAG called on the Government and telecoms regulator Ofcom to put deaf people on to an equal footing with hearing people in their use of the telephone.
Chairman Ruth Myers said that it is pivotal that deaf people have easy and affordable access to the telephone. She said the RNID Typetalk, a text relay service from the 1990's funded entirely by BT under the Universal Service Obligation, has not been updated because there is no incentive or pressure from the government to do so.
“It’s essential that telephone services for deaf people keep pace with technology – and are available at a fair price," she added.
Deaf people are left with even less options since captioned telephony, which uses speech recognition technology to convert an operator's voice into text, closed in December for funding reasons.
Currently, they can only communicate using text relay, which are phone systems that turn speech into text and vice versa, however, it is only accessible via now-obsolete analogue phone lines, or by video relay that uses sign language interpreters via PCs, webcams or videophones.
“This is an increasing and unintended form of discrimination that must be rectified,” Member of Parliament and chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Deafness, Malcolm Bruce said.