Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 25, 1993 TAG: 9307250069
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Instead, he sits down at a machine resembling a laptop computer and types out what he has to say. He is one among thousands of deaf Americans who use a combination of text telephone and hearing operators at special relay centers around the United States.
Using the machine, Goldfarb calls the center and types his message. An operator reads those words to the person he's calling then types the reply to Goldfarb.
People using two-text telephones, also known as TTY, can communicate directly; their machines become the messengers.
Until now, TTY users in some places were confined to instate calls. Starting Monday, under a provision of the 1992 Americans with Disabilities Act, long-distance telephone carriers must make service available to the 26 million people in this country who have impaired hearing or speech or both - the largest group of disabled people.
This step provides universal telephone access to all Americans, said Jerry Vaughan, deputy chief of the FCC's Common Carrier Bureau in Washington.
"It has opened up the entire United States to the best telecommunications system in the world," he said.
Goldfarb, 47, lives in Arlington, Va., and works as an aide to the president of Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf in Washington. For him, using a text phone is a big improvement.
"Before the relay . . . mostly you depended on people who could hear to make your calls for you while you stood there feeding the information to them," he said through a relay center operator.
"The humiliating part was that you didn't have privacy in the matter," he added. And, he said, "you didn't have the sense of self-esteem that comes with handling your own business, so that the sense of dependency was continued even though you had no choice in the matter."
The first relay center was set up in 1975 in Sioux Falls, S.D. It was 12 years before the next was installed in California, said Al Sonnenstrahl, executive director of Telecommunications for the Deaf Inc., a nonprofit organization based in Silver Spring, Md.
Now TTY users have access to relay centers in every state and Puerto Rico. The centers' staff and equipment are funded by all U.S. telephone subscribers as part of the basic service charge - about 12 cents a month, the Federal Communications Commission said.
The text telephones cost $200 to $500, though some states provide them free.
Goldfarb, who was born almost totally deaf, used amplified telephones with varying success before the advent of TTY and relay centers in the 1980s.
Text telephone users may still meet frustration, however, trying to connect with the hearing world.
Goldfarb said he recently called the help line of a computer manufacturer that sold him a monitor screen.
"When the relay operator made contact with the number, the [operator] was greeted with, `Oh, I know about relay calls. They are a lot of trouble. Tell him to call back tomorrow,' " Goldfarb said.
"I was floored. I thought that treatment was entirely wrong and discriminatory and I said so immediately."
Told to wait 10 minutes more, Goldfarb declined and instead wrote a letter of complaint to the computer company chairman. He would not name the company.
Goldfarb said he expected such mistreatment to end with passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which bars discrimination.
"I completely failed to realize that . . . we'd need to prepare the hearing world to accept that our right to communication is equal to theirs," Goldfarb said.
Other difficulties users cite include the added time the system requires and the awkwardness of using a relay with people unfamiliar with the setup. Hearing novices may assume a conversation is over before it is, or begin responding before the typed message is through.
by CNB