There was a Not The Nine O’Clock News Sketch about phones for the deaf which highlighted how perverse the idea of phones for the deaf is. But the truth is that mobile phones have huge value for the deaf. Before digital mobile phones there was no mass market text messaging, the advent of the technology in the mid 1990s changed communication for the deaf in an unimaginable way. Previous text systems allowed deaf people to communicate with other deaf people. Text messaging allowed the deaf to communicate with everyone.
More prosaic is the telephone for the hard of hearing. This is something of a backwater, which is a shame because getting this right makes phones better for everyone. This is true of many inclusive technologies. If you build something people with disabilities can use, you most often make something that everyone finds easier. The poster child for this is the cordless kettle which was originally a project for older and infirm users, now everyone wants their kettle cordless.
The problem with telephones – mobile or fixed – for the deaf is the misconception that all that needs to be done is make them louder. Of course, this comes into play, but clarity is every bit as important and the way that’s ignored is to the detriment of every phone user.
One of the major issues with conversation (as opposed to music playing) clarity is the drive to make phones thinner and squeeze more into them. Many aspects of phone design work better with more space, be it the antenna, camera lens or speaker. What a speaker really needs is a good empty space behind the membrane to allow the air to resonate. Show an empty space to someone who is charged with the aspect of phone design known as packaging and they will want to fill it with a better power amplifier to help the phone talk to the network, more battery or extra memory.
So phone audio is challenged. There is a further hurdle in standards. How a phone is made is laid down in specifications from the organisations ETSI and 3GPP. Here the brightest engineers look at the new technologies and work out what we will want to use in a decade or two. The standards for audio date back to the 1980s when the then twenty or thirty year old techies deemed it wise to limit the maximum volume of phones to protect hearing. It was probably a wise move, but there is now an irony that those same people, now being in their 50s and 60s will struggle to hear their phones.
The standards do allow for boosted audio, but it has to be turned on with each call, generally as a speakerphone. There is however little value in making the audio louder if it’s not clearer at the same time, and a problem with many loud phones is that they become buzzy and less clear.
Clarity is down to a number of things. It’s the physical acoustics of the phone – that having the space for the speaker, the audio hardware, the software and the specification. These, of course, all interact. The specification looks at what standards are used to turn the digital stream of information into sound, the codec.
When 2G phones were first specified the codec was optimised for the German male voice. Back then GSM was a purely European thing at 900MHz, but when a few years later the US woke up and the 1900 MHz frequency for PCS was introduce the Codec was extended. There have been a few iterations of fiddling since balancing data bandwidth with quality and with 3G we got wideband adaptive multi-rate. This was sold under the name HD Voice, and to all intents and purposes it’s been a decade since we last saw an improvement.
What we have seen is a requirement for devices to support hearing aids. This is the result of significant lobbying from the powerful AARP in the US, but that has also failed to keep up with the technology. There is also a requirement that devices support a teletype, but no-one uses this, so no-one cares if it is no longer supported. Text messaging replaced teletype years ago.
There is however a number of products for the hard of hearing. One of the big noises in this field is Geemarc a British company which makes a whole range of amplified products including fixed line and mobile phones. Along with Geemarc, there are lots of smaller companies and a leaf the mail order catalogues which plop through the letterboxes of older people shows broadly similar phone. Usually 2G with a big speaker and the option to turn the speaker and volume up.
They are not however available in the US. Two things stop them being sold there: Intellectual Property and Type Approval. The IP issue comes down to the fundamental patents in building a phone. Many of the no-name Chinese manufacturers take an illegally laid back attitude to paying for the mostly American and European rights for the software. While the companies feel that they can get away with sales in Europe they are scared enough of Qualcomm to not approach the US market. Their fears are probably unfounded but it’s the second issue which kills all US approaches dead. All phones sold in the US have to go through FCC type approval and this is expensive. The nature of the US market is such that if the phone is being sold by one of the big US networks it’s worth the expense. But the SIM-free market we have in Europe is not significant in the US. Nearly all phones are bought subsidised, on contract. The US networks, aside from Great Call, don’t have any interest so no-one type approves amplified phones. The SIM-free volumes don’t merit the cost.
But you don’t have to have a special phone. The UK company Goshawk has a solution which puts the hearing aid in the network. The phone user does a hearing test and the Goshawk software determines which frequencies the customer can hear well and which ones he or she struggles with. The audio in all calls is then dynamically modified so that the frequencies the customer struggles with are boosted and those which they are fine with are not. This removes the problem of the difficult to hear sounds being washed out by the ones which can be heard. Goshawk is part of Manx telecom and will shortly be launching a service on the UK mainland using the EE network.
No-one deserves to be cut off from those they love, mobiles have revolutionised our lives and for those with disabilities the application of technology be it adaptive like Goshawk or built-in like text messaging is even more profound. Perhaps the Not The Nine O’Clock news sketch was a true word said in jest.
