Is captioning telephone calls necessary?

Today, it’s difficult to imagine not having a telephone or a mobile phone. On this day in 1973, the first mobile phone call was made in New York. The Motorola mobile phone used was bigger than a brick. It was 9 by 5 inches and weighed over 2 pounds. The talk time on this phone was only 30 minutes, and it took 10 hours to recharge.

Today, the smallest mobile phones will fit on your key fob. Technology has moved fast in 44 years. The top smartphones offer a glittering array of features such as iris and fingerprint scanning. Packing in more and more features, the top phones are getting bigger – often at the cost of a shorter battery life – and can cost as much as a cheap car.

With all these advances in technology, you’d think one group of people who can’t use the phone would be well served: deaf people. Mobile phones have been a boon for deaf people as they can now send text messages and use Whatsapp. But when a deaf person needs to interact with a hearing person, it suddenly becomes a different ballgame. There are 70 million deaf and hard of hearing people worldwide who have difficulty using telephones. Say hello to captioning telephone services.

Text phones for deaf people were traditionally minicoms which were the size of a small laptop with a QWERTY keyboard and mini LCD display screen. The deaf user would be able to call a hearing person via a third party text relay service. There are now text phones available with voice over facility, where the text relay operator voices over for the deaf person to the hearing person.

I have always found text phones difficult to use, mainly because of hearing people’s attitudes towards them. I would often see the real-time text relayed to me say “We’ve got someone on a text phone, does anyone know how to use this?” or “We need to get someone to call you back” or “We can’t talk to you with a third party on the call” or even “No we’re not interested in buying anything!”.  Even today, my mortgage company refuse to speak to me via text relay, and I have to ask my financial advisor to call them on my behalf – they’re perfectly happy to speak to him, which is a complete joke. Some hearing people are even abusive to the poor text relay operators who are only trying their best to give us access.

Once having overcome the hurdle of ignorance, if I was successful in actually getting hold of the person I wanted to speak to, then having them STAY on the phone, I then had a long and painful conversation with them. They spoke, the text relay operator typed what was said, and I typed back then typed ‘GA’ every time I was ready for their reply, then the operator would tell the hearing person what I had typed, back and forth, back and forth. ‘GA’ meant ‘Go Ahead’. This made for very awkward and stilted conversations.

The time it took to connect to the number I wanted to call and relay the message meant the text relay system did not work well with automated systems, such as when I wanted to call the bank. “Option 1, Customer services, Option 2, Account queries, Option 3, Complaints, Option 4 …” by the time the text relay operator had typed the option I wanted, and I told her which option to choose, I would usually get a message back saying the system had hung up on us and we had to call again!

Another major difficulty I had with text phones was that as I had to call someone via the text relay call centre, where a typist would relay what was said to me, I had to dial the call centre (18001) before calling the hearing person, or have the hearing person phone the call centre’s number (18002) as a prefix to my number. 99% of hearing people just could not wrap their head around the fact they had to dial 18002 first, and so they would just say ‘Forget that, I’ll just call Tina direct’ and of course they would bypass the captioning telephone service and I wouldn’t be able to hear them. Fancy that!

This was the reality of captioning telephone services for many deaf people in the UK.

Text relay, I don’t like, don’t use, unless I have to. A minicom is outdated technology, which I am astonished has not been updated by anyone.
– Beth Smith

With the addition of a voice over facility, confidence, and a clearer voice, I was able to speak to hearing people instead of type, but still had to wait for the captioning telephone operator to type what she could hear. In the UK, these calls take so long that users get a 60% rebate off their phone bill.

To cap all THAT off, each time I moved jobs or offices, I had to ask the building engineer for an analogue landline as the text phone handset could only cope with a 300 baud rate. This usually didn’t get figured out and after several months it was accepted I would have to rely on email. I did have one clever dick who managed to set up a virtual phone system for me, piggybacking on the existing ancient PBX phone network. He spent hours in various phone exchange boxes in the middle of London trying to sort this difficult one out and grew a few grey hairs along the way, I’ll never forget the moment when he came to tell me had managed to come up with a solution for me, he was so proud of himself, and I was suitably impressed.

I am of course grateful to have access to a captioning telephone system and have found in the past that it has been very useful. However if I am to be seen to be a professional and to be able to cope with impatient hearing people who don’t know anything about captioning telephone systems and the access needs of deaf people, it does need to meet their needs as well as mine. I feel my life is too fast-paced and I need-everything-to-work-first-time, or I give up on it. (Much like many hearing people!)

Having said that, plenty of people love using text relay services and wouldn’t be without them – for them, it is a God-send.

I was very excited to get my first mobile phone in 1996 which allowed captioning on mobile (cell) phone calls. It was a Nokia Communicator, one of the first smartphones. This phone allowed me to call a hearing person using a captioning telephone service over the internet, and type my responses on the phone in real-time. The software enabled me to dial the hearing person via a text-relay call centre.

I was one of the first lucky people to experience CapTel in the UK, in 2005. This phone looked like an ordinary phone, with huge buttons and a small LCD display screen. It required 2 digital phone lines. The only hitch was the initial connection, waiting for the typist to connect the call before she started typing, and I came up with a way around this by having a ‘spiel’ for the person I was calling. When the person I called had picked up their phone, I would immediately start speaking – slowly, buying me more time and so they wouldn’t interrupt before I had finished. I would take control and say something such as ‘Hi this is Tina Lannin calling for Martin Smith and I’m calling about your account which we discussed the other day. I just wanted to get confirmation of when the latest invoice for £500 would be paid and whether there was a query on this holding up payment or if it was something else I can help with. I’ve got a few minutes to chat with you about this  …. ‘ – you get the idea, string out your introduction a bit, give the service time to connect.

The CapTel captions appeared on my screen very quickly, the delay was minimal, in fact no one even realised I was profoundly deaf and couldn’t understand a word they said! Having fast typists and high accuracy helped a lot. CapTel moved online but unfortunately the funding for the UK service was pulled and bang, there went my much-loved telephone access.

Technology moved on and in 2014 the UK text relay system for landline phones became digital, meaning the captioning telephone service is now accessible on internet-enabled mobile phones. The new system, Next Generation Text Service (NGTS), aimed to improve communication by allowing parallel speech, hearing, and text, with ability to interrupt the other speaker, and without having to type ‘GA’ when you had finished what you wanted to say. NGTS developed NGT Lite which brings a different set of issues; technology compatibility and user-friendliness. It has been so complicated and problematic to use that deaf people themselves have set up a very helpful self-support group on Facebook, Deaf Next Generation Text Service. There are issues such as the EE phone network is not compatible with NGT, firewalls and software connections, broadband faults, non-iOS standardised keyboard on the NGT Lite app…. there is still work to be done on making telephone access easy.

I met a rep from BT who showed me how to use NGT Lite on my iPhone and iPad, but once I got home, I was unable to start a phone call, it was a big fat #FAIL and I’ve not been able to figure out how to use it since. Plus, I don’t have the time to sit and solve technology and compatibility problems as I have a house, business, family and dog to look after!

There is an app available in the UK and Europe called RogerVoice which uses voice recognition and a VoIP platform to caption your telephone calls. This app is available in several languages however it doesn’t translate. The accuracy and quality is not as good as a human text relay service. RogerVoice is not meant to replace human captioning telephone services but to complement them.

Apple Mac users can try MacWise. This is American software but it works in the UK. Some deaf people are using this, it works with a USB modem and works with Text Relay.

I have been watching the captioning telephone services in the USA for a while. Deaf Americans have some amazing services available;

• Hamilton CapTel Call Me
• ClearCaptions
• InnoCaption
• CaptionCall
• CapTel – CapTel en Español – Braille CapTel
• Sprint CapTel

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requires that deaf Americans purchase a captioned telephone for at least $75 to help offset the cost of the captioning telephone service, although it is possible to have this waived if documentation is produced to certify one’s hearing loss.

There are some useful apps which allow group conversations or one-on-one conversations to be captioned in real-time, but not telephone calls.

• Ava – voice recognition of captioning group conversations (UK and Europe)
• Subtitles Viewer – view subtitles on your iOS device synchronised with the TV or cinema movies
• Live Caption – voice recognition captions conversations for you

I have now “upgraded” my own ears with cochlear implants so my hearing is now perfect, but I still have a deaf brain which struggles to make sense of speech. Hearing people speak SO fast! I have however been able to pick up the phone when it was really necessary and speak to people, I forewarn them by email that I will struggle to hear them with “Please Slow Down”. I usually manage to get the gist of the conversation and of course, they never do slow down! My recent upgrade to Advanced Bionic’s Naida Q90 model means my bionic ears are now capable of this: I can pick up the phone and have the conversation streamed automatically from one ear to the other for binaural listening! Look at me – getting one up on hearing people!

Most of the time, I use 121 Captions’ real-time steno captioning service to assist me in making phone calls over Skype or in teleconference calls. This way, I can get every word as it is spoken, with 99% accuracy, within 1 second. Now, that’s what I call real access.

I feel, for deaf access to work well, existing captioning telephone systems and apps need to work well, be as easy as possible to use, and integrate seamlessly with hearing people’s phone systems and expectations. Hearing people don’t expect to use the phone in a different way from normal, so when something different does come along and pokes them with the deaf stick, they jump and don’t know what to do. Captioning telephone systems for deaf people need to be easy to use, just pick up the phone and call someone without it being obvious there is a third party on the line. One day, I hope, it will be difficult to imagine not having captioning telephone services available to everyone who needs them.

Do you know of any other telephone captioning services or apps which you can recommend? Let us know in the comments!