Welcome back to Finely Revealed. In this episode I want to talk about something that is on our phone bill and has been for about 20 years and how it is actually helping people! It is a charge that appears as a line item on your phone bill and it relates to the interstate telecommunications relay services fund. That is a fund that the telecommunications companies in the US created in response to a requirement in the Americans with Disabilities Act, which came out a while ago which required the telecommunications companies to help those with hearing loss to have the same service or comparable service to people, who don’t have a hearing loss.
So there is a program that helps people and I had an opportunity to talk with someone who’s taking advantage of that system and here’s what he had to say. A special phone called a caption call. How do you get a caption call? You have to go to your audiologist or your hearing person and they take give you tests and if anything below a certain level of understanding then they give you a caption phone. And if you will look at this the screen the screen will be delayed but it comes on automatically and you don’t have to do anything and it’ll come on and it will even tell you if there’s no nothing sounds there’s no music or whatever it is and if you want to call me then I’ll show you what it does. and you can talk. It said you’re unknown. Hello how are you> Talk. What’s going on today?
Well, we did try to I did try to call in and and show it a video how it would do it and somehow the proximity there something that was kind of screwed up so we’ll try it again next time I visit and he explained how you qualify for it with your your you know your hearing loss. But the other qualifications are you have to have a landline phone and high-speed internet. Now there’s no charge. The phone’s about two hundred fifty dollars. There’s no charge to the person receiving it for the actual phone or the delivery or a customer service or installation.
They pay their regular phone bill and in fact they’ve been paying into the service the same as we have on their phone bill for many years. I just thought it was really helpful, It works off of voice a recognition. You can still hear on the other phone but this is it just really allows the communication to flow which is the whole purpose. So I hope this was helpful to you. There is a website for caption call if you want to look at it and there’s also an it looks like they have an iPad app or I ipad version and so you might look into that if that applies.
I just thought it was really unique. I didn’t know what it was before and now we do! So I hope that was helpful.
