On 28/03/12 09:39, Julie Spencer wrote:
> Can any of you please tell me what your Institution has in terms of Text
> phone, mincom etc etc.

We email all students by preference (unless they specically prefer
phones or other methods) as it is easier for us to fit in with our
workload and it's commonly how other HEI depts communicate.  We can't
guarantee being able to answer a call, and returning calls requires a
guaranteed block of time, especially if the length of call is unknown.
An email is easier to assess the time-needed and easier to do in chunks.

Many students have smartphones or will reply to email from university
clusters/network throughout the day.  From talking to our students with
any level of hearing impairment about managing phones they seem to be
like me and prefer promptly answered email to phones of any flavour.
Many (most) of them are use a regular phone and just need people to
speak clearly and repeat occasionally.

I suspect fewer than 5 of our Deaf/deaf/HOH students actually need a
textphone or know what a textphone is, and most don't come to uni with
one.  The few students I know who can't hear a phone will use email
extensively.

My experience as a textphone user is organisational textphones are like
loop systems, probably don't work and the operators tend to not really
know what they are doing and type exceedingly slowly. Textrelay
operators do a much smoother/better job of a phonecall on average.

I have an external BT analogue phoneline with a Minicom6000p for my work
calls which I use for outgoing only (I don't accept incoming due to the
nightmare which is 1800x prefixes).  If we ever received a request for
textphone to textphone calls we could use my textphone/line for it.
Outside of work I only ever use my textphone for government and NHS
departments and occasionally banks if I can't do face to face with them.

I find using a textphone at all that I am a minority even in the D/deaf
community these days.  Those who sign fluently (my sign's quite basic)
tend to use communication support workers or video relay for those
occasions they must use phones via Access to Work.  Otherwise like me
they use email and instant messengers (like skype) extensively.


> We are currently reviewing our provision, need something which works
> from Digital Lines, but its a minefield.

I have seen Textbox as Nasser mentioned but a long time ago in 2005 at
the British Deaf Association, people seemed to like it and it seemed to
work okay.

I don't know if saying that I think there isn't much demand (or even
need given the alternatives) for a textphone service at disability
services is controversial or "phew!".  My banks now don't usually have
minicoms, they just advise me to use 18001 in front of the number which
takes me via textrelay.  And the minicoms they do have are usually
broken or an answermachine instead of a service which is probably
legally dubious.

I think the money spent on a textphone system would be far better
invested in a decent SMS (2 way text message) system, or instant
messenger system (MSN/Skype/Jabber), ensuring prompt email responses and
working with technologies which people like and use.

That ensuring staff are appropriately trained in using everything as
needed from accepting/making a textrelay call through to how to use SMS
or instant messengers.  Training is often overlooked and can cause
issues as our techs have discovered on introducing Microsoft
Communicator which is an instant messenger system within the university.
 Lots of staff have no idea what any of it is about and the techs just
assumed people would know how to use it because they do...

If I had a choice I wouldn't use a textphone or textrelay ever, I'd just
use email, IMs and SMS for non face to face communications.

Natalya