Moment of Silence

Today I got a reminder of something that has bothered me more and more over the past decade: the difficulty hard of hearing or deaf in our society have such great difficulty getting access to many things.  Within the last four months I have been the broker for a client who could not hear in court, a friend who could not get heat because she is deaf, and then today my encounter was with a phone service who did not provide accommodation for users.

Why is this even an issue in 2016?

Shouldn't courts have an easy to use system in place to accommodate our hard of hearing or deaf citizens? It took my court several weeks of me nagging to even get ear sets for my hard of hearing client.  The accommodation was available in my county, but in many it isn't.  I have been party to a court case that went on two years where a deaf mom, deaf dad and profoundly deaf child all had to appear, which meant the court had to hire four separate interpreters.  It truly delayed the process for everyone, but especially for the parents who lost custody of their four kids and needed expert help in getting the kids back.  Finding attorneys who could schedule around interpreters that the court was reluctant to pay for was not easy, and overall I was left with the feeling that there should be a better, more efficient way for the deaf and hard of hearing to receive equal treatment under the law.

In the instance of the gas company, just signing up to have an account to get a gas line run was more like an obstacle course than an easily utilized service - especially shocking since in most counties, like this one, there is only one gas or electricity company which services the area, and therefore the deaf and hard of hearing have no choice but to follow the procedures set out by the monopoly holding company.  For my friend, I will call her Tammy, the procedures were impossible since you could only set up services by calling the gas company.  They had a TDD line, but Tammy doesn't subscribe to that service as it is slow and often error filled in matters like this; they also keep records of all the transcripts, which means Tammy's social security number, birthdate, and driver's license would be in the possession of the TDD company and therefore more open to identity theft.  Tammy could easily have provided this information in a chat or an email, but the gas company refused those methods.  She tried sending in a paper application, but a month with no heat and no contact from the gas company convinced her to ask for my help, after an afternoon of work lost in trying to go to the gas company's physical offices, where no one could help her since you can only start service - you got it, over the phone.  I called the company and within twenty minutes Tammy had a case number, an engineer's name - and his email.  Why would it have been so hard to just allow her to communicate via email in the first place?  My blood was beginning to boil by the end of my call as the chirpy voice on the other end easily gave me the engineer's email.

Maybe if some time had passed I would have forgotten that experience, or at least simmered down, but today Tammy had yet another issue that would have been made so much easier if her cell phone company had any kind of accommodating procedure for the deaf and hard of hearing.  Instead, I called for her when her iPhone was rendered useless after an iOS upgrade, and after half an hour on various holds, I finally got through to a human being in the accessibility department of Apple Support.  He was a very kind fellow but he was very upfront about the fact that Apple has no solutions for Tammy.

How can this be a thing that our society just accepts?