Relay Services and Hard of Hearing Folks: Why Don't They Want to Serve You?

You may recall that just a few months ago I was ecstatic because a couple of Deaf organizations had recognized that the language of some of their public communications was inappropriate, and they took the effort to correct the situation!

Referring to Video Relay Service (VRS), which requires users to sign, Telecommunications for the Deaf, Inc. (TDI) had published a press release that stated, "VRS is the first telecommunications relay service that enables individuals who are deaf and hard of hearing to communicate in their native language, American Sign Language (ASL)." When advocates for hard of hearing (HOH) people (of whom only a tiny fraction sign) confronted TDI with the fact that hard of hearing people don't sign, TDI realized the error of their statement and corrected it. You can read the complete story of these events at http://tinyurl.com/2xgklt

A short time later, Hamilton Relay wanted to hire a CapTel Outreach Coordinator. CapTel is a relay service for members of the HOH community, who do NOT sign. Yet Hamilton wanted to hire a person who was fluent in ASL! Again the HOH advocates objected, and again, a Deaf organization acknowledged the soundness of our position and corrected their behavior. See http://tinyurl.com/2zm43h for the complete story.

About this time we HOH advocates were rejoicing, because it appeared that the Deaf organizations really were interested in supporting the needs of Deaf AND hard of hearing folks. And press releases claiming that hard of hearing people use ASL and benefit from VRS were notably absent for a short time.

Sadly, they're back!

A recent press release from Sprint and HOVRS claims that VRS allows "a deaf or hard of hearing person to communicate freely and expressively, utilizing the linguistic richness of his or her native language."

And one from CSD states that VRS offers "the most sophisticated level of communication access possible for deaf and hard of hearing travelers."

It's enough to make you want to puke.

I know I'll get a bunch of emails from people stating these press releases are ok, because their brother's second wife's hairdresser knows a guy whose mechanic's sister-in-law is hard of hearing and uses VRS. Their argument is that it's ok to make those claims as long as they can find one hard of hearing person who uses VRS, and they were able to find one!

The reality is that these claims are oppressive to the 98% of the hearing loss community who don't sign, because they prevent progress towards truly effective telecommunications solutions that DO work for hard of hearing folks. Members of the general public and people in positions of power see these press releases and believe that VRS solves the communications problem for EVERYONE with hearing loss! So attempts to acquire solutions that actually do work for HOH folks are doomed to failure.

The folks who claim that VRS is THE solution know better. We and others have been educating the folks at the Deaf organizations for years. We've explained that VRS is inappropriate for virtually the entire HOH community. We've explained that claiming HOH folks can use VRS prevents them from getting solutions that really work. And yet the deceptions continue.

Which leads me to ask why representatives of some Deaf organizations knowingly act in ways that prevent a significant portion of the nation's 32 million hard of hearing people from having communications access. Do they think that the only way to get communications access for the one out of a hundred members of the hearing loss community who uses ASL is to oppress the 99 out of a hundred who don't?

Or is there more to it than that?

The fact is that the relay service provided for ASL users is far better than that provided for non-ASL users. VRS is a wonderful technology that does provide functional equivalence to the signing community. Hard of hearing folks use amplified phones, TTYs, and CapTel. For people with mild to moderate hearing loss, amplified phones are a pretty good solution. But for the millions of people with severe to profound hearing loss, no commercially available technology approaches functional equivalence.

The sad part of this situation is that a solution that provides functional equivalence for many of these folks is readily achievable.

Imagine if you could replace the phone with a live person who stood in front of you and voiced, with very clear speech and mouth movements, everything said by the person you were talking to (You would not hear that person, only the person in front of you.) She doesn't mumble, she doesn't talk with gum in her mouth, she speaks clearly and with good projection, and she even substitutes words that are easy to lipread for words that aren't. A phone conversation would be like a one-on-one conversation in a quiet room with one of the clearest speakers you've ever had the pleasure to talk to. Would that be a functionally equivalent solution?

Of course, the relay companies can't actually send you a live person every time you want to make a phone call. But they can send a virtual live person to your computer screen. This person would have all the attributes described above, and would revoice everything said by the person you were talking to. Again, you would hear the revoicer only.

I realize that it's probably not quite as good as the live person in the quiet room, but I think it's pretty close, and far better than the services currently available. I've described this service to representatives of several relay companies, and I've seen it discussed on some of the email lists. And I've never heard a single objection to it for any reason. The relay companies know about it, they agree that it would work (or at least don't dispute those who claim it would), and yet I don't know of a single company that has experimented with such a system or has any plans to!

What I have heard from relay representatives LOTS of times is that VRS as currently implemented is just fine for HOH people. Just ask the interpreter to stand close to the camera and lipread them! You won't have any audio, of course, because current VRS doesn't provide audio, but you CAN lipread, right? It'll work great!

So why haven't the relay companies stepped up to provide a service that really accommodates HOH folks, rather than asking HOH folks to accommodate the service they provide? Could it be that they'd rather collect the $6.64 per minute VRS reimbursement than the $1.29 per minute reimbursement for traditional and CapTel relay?

No that's not a typo in the previous paragraph. The VRS reimbursement rate is $6.64 a minute, or just shy of $400 an hour! Monthly VRS charges (June 2007) are $35 million, or roughly $100 per month for each ASL user in the country.

Is that something the relay companies would rather people didn't know? Do they think people would object to a program that consumed $420 million tax dollars last year ($1200 for each of 300,000 potential VRS users)?

Is it an easier sell if they spread the $420 million annual cost over 32 million DeafAndHardOfHearing people for a per person cost of only $13? Is that more palatable than the actual cost of $1200 per ASL user?

How many people actually use VRS? Is it as many as half of the country's ASL users? One-forth? How many ASL users have the required high speed Internet access and video camera? Is the cost per actual user $2500 annually? $5000?

Would the relay companies intentionally neglect to provide appropriate relay services to 32 million HOH Americans to protect their share of a $420 million pot? Oops, the estimate for next year is $550 million.