Scottish deafness organization pioneering Sign on Screen initiative

From The Herald in Scotland:

Phoning a bank, visiting the doctor, ordering a pizza, or dealing with tradesmen – these are the tasks which most of us take for granted, but for deaf people they can be a mountainous challenge.

In the past, deaf people who needed to communicate over the phone had two choices – hire a sign language interpreter, or use a system commonly known as Typetalk.

The former is expensive, and can be slow to arrange. The latter enables a caller to communicate with hearing people remotely, by typing their message and having it read out by a hearing person – but is slow and far from user-friendly.

Neither method copes well with modern telephone handling systems which require users to select promptly from a menu of options.

Now Scottish charity Deaf Connections is pioneering a new approach, Sign On Screen, which it believes will revolutionise communication for more than 50,000 deaf and hard of hearing people from across the UK. The Glasgow-based organisation has commissioned specialist designers to develop an alternative which uses video and laptop technology to allow deaf people to communicate with the hearing in real time.

It uses similar technology to the popular online telephone service Skype, to connect users to a British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter from their laptop or computer.

The interpreter, sitting in a video call centre, can speak to the hearing person involved in the call and translate back into BSL as needed. It sounds simple but Deaf Connections argue it will revolutionise the lives of many users.

At present, booking a BSL interpreter involves a wait of up to two weeks, and is expensive as they must usually be booked for a minimum of an hour, for what could be a five-minute conversation. Many deaf people resort to using friends and family to translate, losing out on independence and privacy as a result.

Scott Campbell (pictured) became deaf at the age of three. Now 39, he is piloting the Sign On Screen service, which is officially launched this week. Until he began testing the system a year ago, he relied on Text Direct messaging – the more recent name for Typetalk.

Mr Campbell said: “Hearing people take it for granted that they can express a thought immediately every time they speak, but unless I’m communicating with another BSL user, there’s always a delay while I wait for a translator to help me be understood.

“Typetalk has been very useful over the years but it can make those delays in conversation very long, especially when you’re trying to express something which requires a lot of back-and-forth between each side.”

“There’s another element of difficulty in that my first language is BSL, but Typetalk requires me to type in English, so it is almost equivalent to a hearing person having to conduct all their telephone conversations in a second language they’re not entirely comfortable speaking.

“Sign On Screen removes a lot of those barriers and makes conversation much more immediate. I recently used it to have a complicated conversation with a car park company which just wouldn’t have been possible using Typetalk.”

He now even uses the system to talk to family and friends. He said: “I often check in with my mum in Troon using Sign On Screen. I think she appreciates that our conversations flow more easily without the delays of Typetalk.” Mr Campbell, who has just completed an HND in photography, says the system is a significant advance. “It has the potential to revolutionise the way deaf people communicate with the hearing world.”

Gordon Chapman, CEO of Deaf Connections, hopes it will do just that: “With interpreters in such short supply, deaf people often try to manage without and frequently end up not getting what they want or need – sometimes with disastrous consequences to their health, finances or quality of life,” he said.

Interpreters sit in the Deaf Connections call centre (in private rooms – all conversations are confidential) and can help around 20 clients instead of taking two or three bookings a day.

While cheaper than booking individual interpreters, the system currently costs individuals and organisations upwards of 75p a minute, and Deaf Connections is lobbying for a new approach.

Mr Chapman said: “We think it should be free for deaf people – it is in other countries. In America, every hearing person is charged a few cents which goes into a federal pot to provide services like ours.

“We’ve been lobbying the Scottish Government and others to provide this, and we are trying to get public bodies including health boards, local authorities and job centres to pick up the cost when dealing with their clients. I think we are slowly winning the argument.”

Mr Chapman says there has been a lot of interest in the system from other agencies, including the police, to help them communicate with deaf or hard of hearing people who have been arrested, or who wish to report a crime.

Meanwhile Deaf Connections is working with partner charities in England and Wales with a view to providing similar interpreter teams in Liverpool, London and Birmingham, and offering 24/7 cover.

Ultimately the hope is that advances with video calls from mobile phones will allow every deaf person effectively to carry their own interpreter in their pocket.