How often have you heard of this line? Especially when you are on the road, trying to get hold of someone? What happens if you are deaf?
For those who may not have figured it out, I am a very blessed deaf person who have a job that includes traveling to my clients. I travel all over the country, stay at nice hotels, help a wide variety of clients, and do it all despite two pairs of very broken ears.
Despite the blessing, I am confronted with the vast inertia of people with absolutely no ability to think through what they are saying, or expecting from me. The big thing is the telephone.
The only option I have for the phone is to use the Relay Service. It is a service that hires a large number of low-wage paying employees all over the United States, with a huge disparity of skills (from the decent to the downright bad). The demand on the relay service is so high, the companies running them have to pull anyone with a minimum of skills and have them do the job.
My job compromises of very technical terms, and huge variety of unusual needs — and I have found that the relay service is vastly inferior compared to better alternatives, yet people clings so hard to their telephones.
If there’s a conference call — whoops, need the phone. I have to scrape by watching the relay service barely keep up by providing 20% of what is being said, misspelling the acronyms, and chasing after the fast talkers at 240 words per minutes while typing at 60 words per minutes. The only way to keep up on those conference calls is to hire an interpreter, and they get downright expensive at over $75 a hour (including agency fees) per person (got a 2 hours conference call? By law, you need 2 interpreters, and the good interpreters refuses to do it by themselves.) The problem is finding the right interpreter, especially on very tight notice.
But my job is not the only one that request the phone — an insane amount of services rely on the phone. Want to change your rental car because it is crappy/causing problems? Call them! Want to order room service? Pick up that phone! Got a problem with that insurance policy? Dial that number! Got an emergency? 911 for you! The pervasion of the phone as a vital service goes beyond what a relay service is meant to be.
One may note that there are the option of the Video Relay service. It would be a great option if not for one thing — I do not carry my VP200 anywhere, and Sorenson’s EnVision SL software is a very buggy and ancient software that does not function properly. Finally, I rarely have the bandwidth to guarantee that I will be able to do video relay properly (Verizon Wireless is wonderful, but the bandwidth can get quite low at times.)
When I was visiting a friend in Australia, I saw her doing something quite unique — you see, she is so deaf, she does not even bother with hearing aids. Yet she owns a Razr. I kept puzzling over that aspect until I saw her in person. She whipped out that phone, and started signing. It turns out that the Razr she have supports video conferencing! She would place the phone on a table, and we would both clearly see her caller signing back to her, and understanding them (well, as well as I could understand AusLan.)
If there could be something that could be used in place of the VP200, and used over a telephone (with a decent-sized screen, hmm, I would say… iPhone, maybe? 
) with a webcam support pointing back at you, I could have something amazing here in the States.
But it is nowhere to be found! Where in the world can I find such a thing?
Until this is available, everyone please… support e-mails and IM chat. Thanks.
Teej,
Emails and IM chat means you gotta have a computer or cell phone that supports such messages. But, yeah, conference calls — what a nightmare to set up. The only thing ya can do is educate your clients about what you are and what the best mode of communication is for you and your clients. A pain in the ass to do the educating, but once the clients understand where you’re coming from, the emails and IM’s are in some ways more specific, especially when technical/engineering terms are discussed, the client is more likely to spell it out concisely. And then you can respond just as concisely with answers. And what’s more you can print out the the messages to cover your ass.
Buy a MAC computer…use iChat, and HOVRS. Your video problems solved. Your conference call issues solved.
All your woes solved!
Simple!
I use i711.com with a webcam. You can use it with a laptop and as long as you have a high speed connection via air card, DSL, cable or wireless phone, then you can teleconference anywhere. Just yesterday, I was in a teleconference with 30 people. The key is to get the people to identify themselves before speaking. That helps remind them that they have a deaf person participating and it slows down the back-and-forth interaction.
You can videocall with HTC’s Tytn phones (only the ones with the videocamera on the front), but currently AT&T blocks that feature. If anybody figures out how to get around it, I hope it’ll be posted.
And where does the law say you must have two interpreters for assignments more than 2 hours? I’d love to know.
Benyapa… nobody wants to haul a computer around!
yea it wud be great to have two way video calling in usa but right now att has one way video calling however we are working to get two ways video calling ready hopefully in 2008. att is only a wireless carrier that offers that type of video calling program in usa. personally, i dont have my mobile with front video camera yet. my mobile is at&t tilt. hopefully we will provide any full qwerty keyboard mobile with front video camera. i envy those ppl in europe and austrailia use video calling program on roads !
happy holidays.
Hey little brother, so you can’t find an insurance agent as good as your big sister in NC? Shopping price instead of service I see!!! My clients love to use email because they can save the messages. I don’t mind emailing back and forth all day long with my foreign born clients since they can write English better than speak it. I don’t understand why the others want to spend all day corresponding with me when they could just have a quick back and forth conversation. Find yourself a good local independant agent. Despite what the Geico commercials say, you get what you pay for!
I love you and I’ll see you on Christmas eve.
Linda