Captioned telephones in the UK?
I’m hearing impaired and have a landline telephone with a digital cordless phone. One of the things I’ve been checking out recently is the provision of captioned telephony in the UK. There is only one service I’ve been able to find, Typetalk. It’s not available to me as you need to be with British Telecom. And you need a special minicom style telephone. It would be beneficial to all HI people who need it, to have a captioned telephone system that could be accessed irrespective of your phone line provider. And I haven’t found an option for captions on Skype. The only other captioned phone systems I’ve found (for example Bee Media) are for business use, not home use. Does anyone know of a captioned phone system (either for a landline phone, or online) that can be used for home telephones in the UK?
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In the US, we have several options. My wife wants to get caption call I don’t know if it is available in the UK.
@filmfann Thanks for the information about caption call. Unfortunately it’s not available in the UK.
Sending this to linguaphile, our resident expert on such matters.
The CapTel system here in the US is a variant on a relay system. There is literally someone typing the words that the other person is saying. I haven’t heard of CaptionCall – perhaps they are east coast – west coast variants on the same service.
In my search, I found this blog that has some updates – perhaps you might find more information there: http://funnyoldlife.wordpress.com/phones/
The links I gave you in the other thread that are organizations for the deaf and hard of hearing in the UK will also likely have more information for your region.
@hearkat Thanks for the link to the blog. It was very interesting, but it seems that Ofcom is quite slow to take the hint. The most recent update from RNID Typetalk is an app for a smartphone. I hope they get it up and running soon. This will be no use to me of course, as I don’t have a smartphone but will help others. I will check out the links you gave in the other thread for more information.
I’ve been away from Fluther for a while – my last laptops died on me so I’d lost the login details.
Anyway, the updated version of Typetalk is something called Next Generation Text Relay – you can use it on your smartphone or on your desktop PC. I tried it for a while and it works great. The only problem for me is that it requires Java to run. And I don’t like Java. I installed it to test the NGT, and got 2 exploits, both through Java. So I’ve uninstalled it. It’s useful to know about it for work purposes though. But for security reasons I won’t have Java on my own laptop. I’ve managed to get a second hand Geemarc Screenphone which can handle any Text Relay calls ok.
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