Telecommunications Access for Individuals with Disabilities

• People with visual impairments and cognitive impairments use the page feature on cordless phone bases to help locate their handsets.
• Individuals with disabilities who cannot hold cordless phones use models that allow the handset to be operated upside-down in the cradle.
• Individuals with blindness use fax modems rather than dedicated fax machines, so that they can use optical character reading software to convert it to text that can be read by screen reading or Braille display programs.
• Individuals with manipulation difficulties they do not have to feed paper in the machine or shuffle faxes they receive.
• Computers with voice modems can dial phone numbers and make voice calls, which can help individuals with mobility/manipulation, visual, or cognitive disabilities who have difficulty dialing a traditional phone.
• People with mobility/manipulation impairments set their computer's phone feature to auto-answer phone calls.
• The visual signal indicating that a call is incoming on computer phone software benefits individuals who are deaf/hard of hearing.
• People with visual impairments can benefit if their screen reading software can have it announce the Caller ID information.
• People with deafness/hearing impairments often use Internet calls and email because they can communicate faster than they can through relay services.
• Users who have difficulty typing use email because they can take their time constructing their messages offline and then send them when they are ready.
• People with deafness/hearing impairments use programs like ICQ and AOL Instant Messaging to communicate with colleagues in the workplace rather than using interpreters.
• Services that translate email into voice messages are extremely useful to those with vision impairments.

Despite these advantages to using telecommunications, respondents also reported difficulties. One difficulty was that there is no present means to transmit the output from augmentative communication devices to telephones. Therefore, AAC users must put their devices near speakerphones and cannot have private conversations. Another major problem is that people with speech impairments and individuals with deafness/hearing impairments cannot use TTY's or relay services to access interactive voice response (IVR, or audiotext) and automated attendant systems, which require selection from voiced menus to direct calls.

What poses difficulty for some individuals with disabilities, however, is an advantage for others. For example, people with vision impairment find these systems extremely easy to use. Obviously, the need for multiple access modes is just as crucial in telecommunications as in web page design, computer access, and any other situation in which students with disabilities communicate.