Story Analytics

Blogathon Workspace, 6:30 PM

I had an opportunity to interview Dennis Selznick over email. Dennis is profoundly hard of hearing. He works as a Product Innovation Manager for a large telecommunications company based in Kansas. He was kind enough to answer a number of my questions about technologies such as Captioned Telephone (captel – not in Canada yet),  how it differs from the traditional relay service, how hard of hearing people can self-advocate their needs, what companies can do for them, and so on. Thank you Dennis!

Q: When did you lose your hearing? When did you start to feel that your hearing needs were different?

A: I acquired a case of spinal meningitis not too long after my 3rd birthday.  I have no recollection of actually being able to hear without hearing aids – my first memory is waking up in the hospital recovering from the disease and, while not fully comprehending what was going on, seeing my dad talk to me and not hearing any sound.  So for nearly my whole life, I’ve had profound hearing loss.’

I’ve worn hearing aids and was raised orally deaf.  I spoke English, did my best to hear and fit in with my peers, and learned very little sign language plus did not associate often with signers until I went to college.

In college, I did start learning sign language, plus in my 5th year I received an Advanced Bionics cochlear implant.  My CI has served me well, allowing me much greater interaction with hearing people than I ever had with hearing aids.

Q: What technologies and mechanisms do you use at work? How helpful are they?

A: I wear a cochlear implant that I received while I was in college to interact with peers in person.  I have a amplifier with my telephone headset.  I have a CapTel phone and a videophone (Sorenson VP-200, to be precise) at my desk as well.  I use WebCapTel to make calls where it’s more convenient to have captions displayed on the screen of my computer.  When I’m on conference calls, I can use Relay Conference Captioning which is better equipped to handle long, multiple conversations than CapTel service is.  When we host company-wide webcasts, we often have live captioning available with it, which is phenomenal.  If it were necessary, my work can also provide in person captioners or sign language interpreters.

In short, the place where I work has been above and beyond the most accessible company I have ever worked for.  It’s not just me that gets this stuff – there are nearly 50 other employees with hearing loss that I know personally, and I do on occasion particpate in a weekly Accessibility workgroup… where any issues that can be addressed by various representatives within my company can take place.

It’s tremendously helpful to have all these items available to me at any time.  I’m able to focus on producing results instead of fighting a bean counter to justify my acccess.  Especially since these are reasonable accomodations that give me functional equivalency – it’s not like I’m asking for a personal interpreter to follow me around 24/7, I’m getting what I need to get my job done just like any other person with normal hearing can do.

Q: How do you educate your co-workers about your hearing loss?

A: When I meet someone for the first time, and they’re not familiar with deafness or accessibility, I politely let them know that I may not hear them clearly from time to time and not to get offended if I ask them to repeat or clarify.  Sometimes I will be on phone call and not everything will be perfectly translated in to text for me to understand.  I’m empowered to ask my own questions and explain why I did not understand clearly, such as when getting captions on an extremely technical call with lots of unfamiliar jargon.  I also have to hand out phone numbers that aren’t just 10-digit USA phone numbers – people who call me often have to call a toll-free number first then enter in my real telephone number.  Educating people about the relay service and how to reach me usually takes some time in educating them about how I understand things on the phone.

Q: Has hearing loss made you change, or think of changing your job or role?

A: Since I’ve had my hearing loss all my life, my whole career has been dependent on getting a job that will accomodate my needs.  Fortunately, being in a technology field makes this rather simple.  Being in another field that doesn’t allow for text, email, captions, interpreters and instant messaging would make my life much more difficult.

Q: What is your advice to people with hearing loss at work?

A: You always will need to self-advocate for your needs.  You are the only one who either knows what you need or will find out what you need to do your job the best.  Deaf people truly can “do everything but hear” and there are tools out there that will close the gap between not hearing and hearing.  Find the hearing loss resources in your community to get the support you need to fight for your communication access.

Q: What can organizations do to make life easier for employees with hearing loss?

A:  There are a TON of things that organizations can do to make things easier for their employees!

1) Caption or provide transcripts of all audio or video recordings used for things such as training, classrooms, and employee improvement.

2) Provide to employees who need to use the phone: CapTel services, Relay Conference Captioning, and Video Relay services.  TTY relay services are far from being equal to “hearing people” as these newer relay technologies.

3) Provide visual firealarms, phone ringers, alerts that are commonly used for audio-only notification

4) Provide email and IM services as an alternative to phone calls

5) Provide a cell phone that has the ability for the user to type out their messages instead of calling.

There are more, but I’m going to start with 5….

Q: Can you tell us more about Sprint’s Captel? How popular is it in the hard of hearing community in the US ?

A: Sprint’s CapTel service is a tremendous benefit to people who may not be able to hear but can speak.  A person with hearing loss can make a call and get word for word captions either on the screen of a specialized telephone, or on a computer web browser.

As the other person on the line speaks, their words appear on the screen right along at the pace of a normal person speaking, and there is just a slightly noticable delay from the time it’s heard on the phone until the word shows up on the screen (approximately 3-5 seconds behind on average).

Sprint’s CapTel service uses voice recognition technology with trained human captioners behind the scenes to accurately caption everything heard from the other of the phone.  That’s because pure voice recognition on the fly is still being worked on so that it’s very accurate.  Everything the human captioners caption is protected and extremely secure.  Even portions of the US Government, such as the Department of Defense and the IRS, use CapTel with their employees and clients.

CapTel service (and in fact, all relay services in the US) are provided at no charge.  If you are using the relay services in the United States, you will not see a markup or a fee to use relay – you’ll be charged just as if you were able to hear and make the call.  Even calls made using the internet, such as WebCapTel, or Video Relay service, will be completely free, no charge to even make the call.

To see CapTel in action, check out captel.com, there’s a great intro video at http://captel.com/videos-model200-overview.php.

Sprint’s website for CapTel is http://sprintrelay.com/captel.htm, and the newer web based service is www.sprintcaptel.com.  To see a video of WebCapTel, click below the “Try It!” button on the home screen of www.sprintcaptel.com.