Life Is Calling

Today, I had a fun post about my family planned, but when I got to work, I had am email from my manager that changed my mind.

I’ve really only talked about exactly what I do in this post. But I’ll tell you a little bit about it here. 

I assist people who are deaf and hard-of-hearing (mainly hard-of-hearing) make phone calls. My official job title is “Communications Assistant.”  My job is to listen to the hearing user and type out what they say so that the deaf or hard of hearing user can read along with the captions while using the hearing that they are able to. They have special phones called “Caption Call” phones that display the captions right on the screen.

One of the main reasons these phones exist is because the Americans With Disabilities Act mandates it.

The American Disabilities Act mandates Telecommunications Relay Services

“Title IV of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 mandated a nationwide system of telecommunications relay services to make the telephone network accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing or who have speech impairments.  Title IV of the ADA added Section 225 to the Communications Act of 1934.”

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I work for a company called Caption Call.  It started as a third department of Sorenson Communications and grew so large that it broke off and became it's own company.  

We also provide Video Relay services with ASL interpreters. Until recently we also provided relay opperating allowing deaf/hard-of-hearing users to send an IM and have an operator make a call on behalf of the deaf/hard-of-hearing user.  This department was recently dissolved due to serious cut in our compay.

Recently, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has implemented new regulations that will make the phones harder for people to use them and limit their ability to recieve them which is a violation of the ADA.

A couple of things that the FCC is trying to do is charg our customer $75 for their phones.

It is already required that they pay for regular phone service and for broadband internet. Many of our customer are on fixed incomes because they are elderly and have a hard enough time affording the internet to make the phone work.

How much did you pay for your landline phone? It probably wasn't $75...

And this is only the tip of the iceberg. To learn more about what the FCC is doing to not only impede business but cause communicating to become more difficult for our customers visit keepcaptions.com.

Contact you local government and encourage them to take action. The ADA states that state laws can add more protection to those with hearing loss. Help us take action and protect the people who need this service.

The following video, although it may come off a little cheesey, describes exactly why I work at CaptionCall...

Life is calling.