Q: At home, what kind of equipment do you use to make it
possible for you to use the phone?
A: I don’t actually have a regular TTY at home. A TTY is a keyboard and acoustic coupler built into one device.
(I have a portable TTY for travelling. My big complaint is that without making the care and feeding of your batteries your life’s work, the batteries simply do not hold a charge. Carrying an extension cord around doubles the bulk of the thing and more often than not, there is no power outlet anywhere near the pay phone. I was once told by a phone company representative that if outlets were put near pay phones, homeless people would bring electric blankets and set up housekeeping. I simply cannot believe the probability of this outweighs the necessity of every deaf TTY user at least occasionally needing the power to make a phone call. It wouldn’t be necessary, of course, if public TTYs were more numerous.)
At home I use three methods. First, I have a special modem in one of my PCs that can communicate at the same 45.5 baud Baudot code as a regular TTY. Together with the TTY software, it permits me to have a telephone conversation with another person who has a TTY or similar modem. There are several models of this device on the market. (Please do not ask me what model(s) I use or to recommend specific brands. You can find assistive devices vendors on the Internet.)
To talk to people who don’t have TTYs, I call the Relay Service and they act as an intermediary: they type what the hearing person says and read aloud what I type. It is possible to use voice carry-over (VCO) where I would speak into the handset and read on the text display, but I don’t use this. For one thing, I don’t have a handset on the computer set-up I use, and the second thing is I just don’t find it important enough to me personally to convey my personal voice on the phone.
The second telecommunication method I use is faxing. I first got a fax machine in 1990. At the time, it was still rather a mark of prestige. Rather than the impression of a pitiable disabled person not able to use a regular phone, offering a fax number had sort of the cachet of a fellow business-person hard to reach by phone but eager to stay in touch, using the latest technology. As it has become more ubiquitous, it doesn’t have as much premium cachet, but not having a fax number has become even more of a disadvantage. The fax has given me a lot of flexibility in contacting hearing people who did not have a TTY and were not keen to have a stilted conversation through the relay operator.
I combine fax and TTY on the same phone line using a switch device which recognizes an incoming fax tone and sends those calls to the fax while all other calls go to the TTY. The disadvantage of this device is that older fax machines won’t get through (because the operator dials, listens for the fax tone, and presses “send”). My fax doesn’t even come on the line until the sending fax beeps first.
A third telecommunication method is e-mail. Sending and receiving e-mail can replace phone calls, and increasingly faxes as well. I go through fax paper very slowly these days.
