Ben Fletcher

In the evening yesterday over at Portcullis House, Westminister, we were lobbying for better provision for deaf people to communicate with hearing people over the phone and Internet. The BBC picked this up here – incidentally today BBC also interviewed me with 13 questions here. It was great to see SignVideo and Teletec demonstrating high quality captioning and video interpreting technologies.  The services need urgent funding to become real and as widespread as in, amongst others, America and Sweden. I got to meet Ofcom people Peter Bourton, Commerical Policy, and Katie Hanson, Consumer Policy, whom I knew from Sense. We discussed the US’s model of varied tax schemes versus UK’s across the board. In the US,  federal and state governments add specific taxes to bills such as “tax for relay services” on phone bills, whereas the UK has just the VAT and smoking, petrol, etc., duties. We compared the situation in Sweden, with high taxation providing services, with the one which exists in the UK: low taxation with businesses expected to provide what is termed as reasonable – often inadequate or poor  – access. I met the lobby sponsor Malcolm Bruce MP who emphasised the need for more awareness of the urgency of the issues in political circles (“talk to your MP too,” he said).

Speakers all said that in general the 1 pound a minute it costs deaf people for communication over the phone and Internet compared to the 1 pence a minute it costs hearing people is a gap that needs narrowing. Tish Kerfoot who had the good fortune to live in America and now has been living in London for over a year explained, in BSL, how the video service really opened up the world for her – and me when I had the opportunity – where everyday conversations went from unclear and prolonged to very amicable and productive.

Meanwhile, Jeff and I wondered about deaf people who are also blind, people who weren’t mentioned in the speeches, naturally tactile gloves and augmented video streaming came up but today a colleague Twittered about something Jeff and I didn’t see coming:

Airbourne Ultrasound Tactile Display

Looking at the interview with BBC again, I was described as “hearing and visual impaired” which is absolutely fine but I think a more appropriate description for some deaf people in the UK, which has more urgency, would be “language impaired” – we need full language access!!