TCALL Mobile Telephone Project

RESEARCH PROJECT ON MOBILE TELECOMMUNICATION FOR DEAF PEOPLE - TELECOMMUNICATIONS FOR ALL

TCALL First Year Review
TCALL Second Year Review
TCALL Disability Links

A three year collaborative research project has been launched, which aims to influence telecommunication developments to take account of the needs of people with a hearing loss, including deaf people.

The TCALL (TeleCommunications for ALL) project is supported by the LINK Personal Communications Programme with grants from the Department of Trade and Industry and the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council.

The consortium includes Orange the digital wirefree phone network from HUTCHISON TELECOMMUNICATIONS (UK) LTD, PORTSET SYSTEMS Ltd a small specialist manufacturing company, and two universities (BRISTOL and DUNDEE) with previous experience in this area.

The project will examine the requirements of people with hearing loss for services that will enable them to communicate, firstly with other deaf people and secondly with the hearing world. The customers for these services will include people with a wide range of degrees of hearing loss, ranging from the hard-of-hearing to profoundly deaf people, whose preferred mode of communication may include sign language.
About 10% of the population will have some degree of hearing loss during their lives

The research work will examine the use of text and pen-based graphics communication; fax; video transmission of sign-language; and automatic translation (in both directions) between text and speech. Experimental equipment implementing particular services will be made available to deaf people, for evaluation in a series of trials, so that the services may be optimised to meet their requirements. The lessons learned will also be fed into the development of technical standards for future systems, so that appropriate services can be included at the design stage rather than being added on later.

David Jackson from the Centre for Deaf Studies at Bristol University said; "There are a large number of people in the UK with varying degrees of hearing loss. Their needs are rarely addressed when new technological development, that improve the lives of the population at large are brought to the market. This project will go some way to help redress that balance. I particularly welcome the generous support Orange have given to getting this project underway".

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