Business and consumer market customers traditionally have been the focus of the paging industry’s marketing and sales efforts. But there is a hidden, some say ignored, segment of the population that has a more unique need for paging technology … the deaf and hard of hearing.
A deaf parent with a deaf child cannot just open the door and yell to the playing child when it’s time for dinner. A deaf teacher at school cannot simply be called over the school’s public address system to summon one of her students.
Paging has the capability to address these issues in the deaf community.
“People don’t understand how big this is,” said Laurie Kraus, president of a hearing enhancement research and sales company called Soundbytes. There are 24 million Americans who are deaf or hard of hearing, she continued, and virtually all would benefit from such paging technology.
“It’s more important for a deaf person to have a pager than a hearing one,” she said. “You can’t understand how cut off a deaf or hard of hearing person is. It’s so frustrating.”
With this in mind, some industry players have taken steps to address the special needs of the deaf and hard of hearing, but advocates for this community claim much more needs to be done to truly be of universal benefit. Some bugs have been worked out, such as Motorola Inc. creating the Silent Advisor pager, a vibration alert device with no audible alert options. That feature eliminates the tendency by some deaf users to accidentally switch a pager alert option to audible, rather than vibration, leaving them unaware that they have received a page.
But there remain other more complicated problems that must be met before the deaf and hard of hearing truly embrace the technology. This is most apparent with two-way text messaging. Mobile Telecommunication Technologies Corp. recently gave some 70 students at the Galludet School for the Deaf in Washington, D.C., free SkyWriter service and devices for a month to determine the two-way paging services’ potential use in the community.
“What we discovered just amazed us,” said Mark McElroy, director of corporate communications at Mtel. “I’ve never seen anybody more excited.”
In particular, the SkyNews service, which delivers the latest news to the pagers twice a day, was a surprise favorite. “We were getting comments like, `This is like a radio to me’ from them,” McElroy said.
But a big problem cited by the deaf community is the inability to ubiquitously reach pagers directly via their primary means of communication: a telephone teletype machine, also know as TTY or TDD. These devices basically are machines hooked up to a phone that allow one person to type text messages and send them over the phone line to another person with a similar machine also attached to a phone line.
The problem is that in some areas, someone using a TTY is unable to directly send messages to an alphanumeric pager.
Deaf users want the ability to dial the number to send a page, have the prompt to enter the pager’s PIN number appear on their TTY machine, and then type in their message on the TTY to be sent to the alpha pager … and they want this available nationally.
McElroy said Mtel has a special toll-free number TTY users can call to reach one-way alpha pagers this way, but not for the two-way pagers, which were otherwise so universally loved.
“We’re in the process of evaluating and developing a two-way solution,” he said. But the company is not yet close to developing a solution that would allow a two-way pager to send a response message directly back to a TTY, which is what deaf people ultimately want.
If two-way messaging ever achieves the network and reliability of traditional paging and creates a solution for direct TTY access, “It’s going to be what a mobile telephone is to a hearing person,” Kraus said.
The issue of TTYs directly connecting to an alpha pager is a sticky one. Carriers say the ability to do so is presently available, but the deaf and hard of hearing community testify otherwise.
Don Shirley, director of technology at Paging Network Inc., for instance, said 90 percent of PageNet’s terminals have modem banks that accept several transmission protocols, including TTY.
The system recognizes the TTY machine like it does computers that send pages manually, and will prompt the TTY to enter the PIN number of the pager to be reached, and so on. The manufacturer of the modem used, the Hark 2000, agreed.
“As far as we know, we’re pretty compatible to the devices that are out there,” Shirley said.
Kraus at Soundbytes said otherwise. “They don’t have the capability. All these big companies say they have them (TTY connections) but they don’t. Half the people there don’t even know what a TTY is.”
Throwing technical jargon back and forth like adolescents in a food fight, advocates of the deaf community and technicians in the paging industry still are working to determine exactly what the problem is, or if there is one.
In the meantime, several paging providers have offered some alternative solutions.
Because the deaf community is close knit, it is often easier for insiders to market paging services to it than outsiders.
One such insider is GA Paging, a paging reseller in Boston. (GA is a code used by TTY users at the end of each message, meaning “go ahead”). According to owner Judy Collins, the company offers a national 800-number to TTY users wishing to send an alphanumeric page. GA Paging will take the message and then resend it via its dispatch service to the pager. Collins said she also hopes to handle any deaf-related customer service problems carriers have, noting that not one paging carrier has a TTY-based customer service line.
Another company is NotePage, a paging service provider also in the Boston area, specializing in communications-and-computer integration.
The company has created a paging engine called PageGate that uses five different front-end interfaces to dispatch text messages to alphanumeric pagers, including e-mail, Web site, Graphical User Interface, Commandline/ASCII module and TTY. Like the GA Paging service, NotePage allows TTY users to call a national 800-number with their page.
But with the PageGate engine, the message is sent directly to the alphanumeric pager. No middleman or resending is necessary, according to the company.
At this time, the company has yet to create a software system that will allow a two-way alpha user the ability to return the page directly to the TTY.
Although only having offered these services for a few months, both companies claim they are quite successful and believe paging carriers, and their deaf customers, would benefit greatly with programs similar to theirs.
