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Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Now hear this, hear this! No more excuses for creating service barriers for the deaf 

Now your Council Information System (and indeed the LibDems nationally) have no excuse for being inaccessible by phone to deaf people. A big welcome for TalkByText, which should revolutionise access to ‘customer service centres, helplines, banks, hospitals, council offices, or any client-facing department.’ This product won the sustainIT National Well-Being Award for third-sector initiatives in March 2007.

As the RNID fact-sheet points out:

Many deaf and hard of hearing people find it difficult to use a voice-phone and prefer to use a textphone to make calls. However, traditional textphones are expensive, old-fashioned analogue devices, which do not work well in modern corporate networks. In contrast, TalkByText is a software only solution that can be installed on PCs, allowing businesses to communicate effectively with textphone users without the need for any additional, costly equipment.

These services should also for the first time be accessible from mobile phones running the RNID TalkByText Mobile software.

More on the sustainIT winners and commended projects for 2007 here.

SustainIT's eWell-Being Awards are the UK's only National Awards that identify and promote social, economic and environmental benefits of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).

Any other deaf LibDems out there? Lets build up some pressure to make sure this advance is exploited wherever LibDems have some power or influence. In our own Party for starters.

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