PhoneAbility

8. Video telephony and video information for deaf people

PROFESSOR JIM KYLE - Centre for Deaf Studies, University of Bristol

The Deaf community is on the verge of a massive breakthrough in distance communication. If we consider telecommunications as it was for hearing people 100 years ago, Deaf people have reached a similar point in evolution - but this time of visual communications.

We have been working to trial video telephony solutions for Deaf people (mainly older Deaf people, in the first instance) and also to develop video information services in British Sign Language. In this paper, two specific project areas and their practical outcomes will be described - Sign 50+ and the WISDOM project with its news and information service - Deaf Station.

The story is simple. It should be a human one. For elderly Deaf people, the degree of isolation is extreme. Most Deaf people come from hearing families. Brothers and sisters and parents are hearing. They marry another Deaf person and they usually have hearing children. It makes the Deaf community one-generational, so grandparents and children are usually hearing. There are no blood ties usually between Deaf people and younger Deaf people, so when a partner dies or when a couple just become older, problems of communication are enormous.

People nearby, such as the neighbours, are usually hearing. They cannot communicate effectively. Radio and television are unavailable. The Deaf people have limited access to books and newspapers. The isolation from others is enormous.

Sign 50+ is a project that developed from research with elderly people which produced this picture of isolation. Its primary aim is to give people somebody to talk to - it is almost as simple as that. If Deaf people could have the same access to telephones as hearing people, then personal contact would be improved. We have done this by providing videophones in the homes of these older Deaf people.

Bristol City Council have been involved, but BT are the major stakeholder and financier of the project. We are creating a framework for BSL at a distance. These are pictures of Motion Media ISDN videophones which we use for sign language communication.

Fig 8.1 Videophone used for sign language communication

The sorts of screens that you would expect to see are shown in Fig 8.1. The video quality on these ISDN videophones is good enough to carry out sign language communication. We have been using them most extensively in the last three to four years, although we initially started working with these videophones in 1997 funded by DTI.

The procedure which the Deaf Studies Trust follows is that we identify older people; then we install the videophones in conjunction with BT. We provide training, arrange workshops and carry out the research on use. We prepared guidelines for BT on how engineers should behave when they enter someone's home, and we provided a training CD for BT engineers.

We have set up a relay interpreting service and we have created trials for emergency 999 service through videophones. We are now working with IP videophones.

Why would people use a videophone? For the same reason as hearing people use them. To have a chat, in an emergency, make appointments, carry out transactions, shopping. Interestingly, Deaf people do not want home shopping. It is one of the big services in broadband and they say they do not want it. Why? Because it would keep them in the home. They want to go out and meet people and say "I want people contact, not Internet." This is an important point to remember. They want to find out the news from family and friends. They want actually all the same things that hearing people want from a telephone

We have installed just over 40 videophones in people's homes - that is, not in libraries or public places where they are not used. It is possible to go through a list of ISDN videophones in the UK, and if you dial those numbers it would be surprising if more than 30% produced a response, and probably less than half of those where there are people who can communicate in sign language. Videophones are not well used once they are put into public places.

We interviewed our participants on their use of videophones. This is a short extract from what one man said:

"When I got the video phone, I felt it really hit me. Before that, because I had had a Minicom textphone, I had fax, and most of that didn`t fit. I couldn`t make the contact. When you got sign language, you really felt the person was with you and you really could have that sort of exchange. It brought it to life."

This is another person who is 82 years old said:

"When they told me about the video phone, I wasn`t really very sure about it. I said I would have a look. They brought it over and put it down. You know, it`s really good. It keeps me 'up'. It means bodily, physically, mentally, it keeps me alive and up. It helps my eyes because I have to keep looking at it."

We carried out interviews with people and we made lots of these videos. Their views were very clear that it was a major step forward.

We set up a relay service and one of the Deaf users explained why it is important:
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"For years, we had to go to the social worker, had to ask friends and family. We had to ask to please telephone for me, to get to the doctor. We can stop that now. We can do it ourselves. Why? Because there is a video phone there. You don`t have to write anything, you just sign to it. The video phone goes straight through to an interpreter. If you want to book a doctor`s appointment, yes, you can do it yourself. You don`t have to ask people. Go straight to the video phone, make the booking and it`s finished. The next week the doctor`s appointment is made. It means I can do it all myself. I don`t have to wait for people. I don`t have to wait for family or friends to ask them to telephone for me. It`s all gone. That sort of thing is gone. It`s in the video phone. That`s why we want to encourage people to use that. If you have a problem, you can contact through the video phone and solve that problem."

Fig 8.2 Remote sign language interpreting

There are three pictures above Fig 8.2, one of a hearing person speaking through a normal telephone to an interpreter, who has a headset and who is speaking to that person, but also at the same time communicating through a video phone to the third picture, which is the deaf person signing to a video phone. It is as simple as that.

We ran the service and took a snapshot of it. There is a table here, Fig 8.3, with some indication of the results.

IPS started on	April 2003
Hours in total in this period	110
Call made out (include all attempted calls)	536
Calls to hearing people	72
Incoming calls	6
Problem/failed/error	103
Total Interpreting transactions	122
Length of calls	11 - 30 mins
This phase of IPS finished in	November 2003

Costs of these transactions normally ~ £7000 - ie double the IPS cost

Fig 8.3 Call durations

IPS is an interpreter push service - meaning that the interpreter calls the Deaf person (reducing the cost to the user and also increasing the contact with the Deaf user. Participants are asked if they wish to call anyone and then the interpreter makes the three part call.

There is not enough time to explain this, but basically the table shows that the average length of calls was between 11 and 30 minutes, although some were rather longer. The costs of the transactions, if you had had to use an interpreter, would have been about £7,000. The cost of this relay service is less than £3,000 , so it is a huge cost saving. The issue is it is much more immediate and actually works.

Minutes	Reasons
5 - 10	Chat & doctors appointments
11 - 20	Chat, made calls for hairdresser, family & health
21 - 30	Made calls for family, Bristol City Council repair, doctor & electrician
31 - 40	Made long calls i.e. insurance companies

Fig 8.4 Reasons for using interpreting service

The second table says what the interpreting service is used for. Short calls tend to be chats with people, doctor's appointments. Longer calls tend to be making appointments for the hairdresser, family and health things. Calls tend to be up to 30 minutes to Bristol City Council, doctors and electricians. It seems that insurance companies took the longest! It takes 40 minutes to try and sort out your car insurance.

We set up a trial with the emergency services such that when, you call, you would reach a Deaf operator using a videophone. We trained Deaf people to work in the Police Command and Control Centre on the systems that they operate in order to deal with emergency calls. Instead of using voice, the calls came in on a videophone and the Deaf person communicated through the videophone. They recorded all the details using the police computers. The videophones have caller identification, so you know exactly where the Deaf person is and because it is video, you can tell if the house is burning down! Unfortunately, the telecoms companies have looked at this and said, "Who is going to pay for it?" There are also major issues about the quality of service, so it has not yet gone further.

The next stage of this type of development is that we are working with IP Internet videophones on broadband. It is meant to be cheaper although for light users this may not be the case - since they have to have an Internet connection also. These IP videophones are more appropriate to the other broadband developments, in that they are more integrated. In theory, there is also a basic webcam option if you have a computer, which most of our older people do not have.

Fig 8.5 H323 Videophone

Fig 8.5 shows an example of an H323 video phone. We have been trialing IP video phones. For elderly people, the option of using a computer with a webcam is often not the correct one, so we have been trialing different types of options.

In our trials, the quality can vary and the person on one side may report the quality differently. However, in an ADSL connection, it is certainly possible to see and understand. The difficulty is that quality of service is not guaranteed and varies, so we find that the picture can become unstable and you can get a situation where you have to repeat, and occasionally the whole conversation stops.

Information Services

The second area is the WISDOM project. The "w" stands for "wireless". This is a project we set up and ran until early 2004. It is a project of wireless and Internet services for Deaf people. As part of the project we aimed to develop a prototype mobile videophone which unlike the versions currently on the market, would offer a frame rate which was acceptable for signing. This part was not completed due to commercial pressures.

We worked very closely with Vodafone, with Ericsson and with a number of partners in Sweden. We also developed a daily news and information service for Deaf people.

Fig 8.6 Deaf Station initial screen

The initial screen, Fig 8.6, is rather complex because it offers you three different types of connection. It will download the video to you either as a broadband connection, an ISDN type connection or as a modem connection. The video is compressed in different ways to suit different types of connection. We can deliver video on an ordinary phone line through this means, but it is not ideal.

On the lower right-hand part of the opening screen, there is a link to a phrase book application. This is interesting because we developed a multilingual sign language phrase book for use on mobile phones as well as on PCs with broadband connections. If you have a 2.5G or GPRS phone, you can use this. It works in British, German, Spanish and Swedish sign language, and also in the written languages of these countries. You can go from written Swedish into, "Hello, good morning" in British Sign Language.

Fig 8.7 Deaf Station main screen

In the main screen of Deaf Station Fig 8.7, the signer provides all of the content in BSL - news, information and all menu headings are signed.

This screen demonstrated shows a report on the British Deaf Association Congress, where the signer explains for Deaf people exactly what is happening. What is interesting about this is that it was recorded at the BDA Congress in Inverness. It was edited there with the software that we developed and then it is compressed and uploaded with a single button press to the server in Bristol, so that it was online immediately.

As an extended application, Deaf Station is supplying the software and the training to people on site in Melbourne, who will film competition in the Deaf Olympics. They will, interview people, put together the video, press a button which will compress it in all the ways that are needed, and also upload it to the server in Bristol - that is direct, from Melbourne on the same day that the events are happening.

Fig 8.8 Reporting the Deaf Olympics

Because of the time difference between Australia and Britain, it will be on the server at nine o'clock in the morning British time, having been completed by six or seven o'clock in the evening Australia time. This is actually phenomenal use of broadband and it is the first time ever that deaf people will actually be able to see what happened in the Deaf Olympic Games. It has never been broadcast on television or anything else. It is the first time we will have access to it.

Finally, we are testing the Swedish platform called Marvin, which will allow simultaneous voice and video telephony. The problem with it is that the implementation of SIP, which is the protocol connecting to video stations, has not been implemented properly by the manufacturers. Different types of SIP do not connect to each other very well, so we are having major problems with this, but it will provide a remote interpreting service with the specific advantage that the interpreter does not need to be in a call centre. The interpreter can be at home in his pyjamas and will take the video call from home. This is a potential cost saving. One of the biggest problems at the moment is having to bring interpreters into a call centre. We do not have to do that.

We are working on new initiatives - such as Sign Station a portal for hearing people to reach information in sign. The biggest priority is quality of service. Broadband is not guaranteed quality of service. Just adding bandwidth is not going to solve the problem. We need to develop more and better packaging of Internet services and equipment appropriate to Deaf people. We need to extend the news and information services and we need to provide more free access to remote services for Deaf users. For us, the final solutions in regard to broadband for Deaf people are the three "I"s: installation, information and interpretation.

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