TAG campaigns for deaf telecoms

The Government does too little to help deaf people access special telephone services, according to a hearing organisation.

The TAG Consortium, which represents a range of hearing charities including the Royal National Institute for Deaf People, has launched a campaign called ‘Bringing Deaf Telecoms into the 21st Century’.

It hopes to force the Government to fund technology such as captioned telephony, which uses speech-recognition software on a PC to convert voice into text, and Video Relay, which uses webcams.

Although Video Relay services are widely available in the US and Australia, the UK has only two because of a lack of funding.

To start the campaign TAG and people with hearing impairments used Video Relay services to lobby politicians in the UK. TAG says it will carry out more events in the future.