PhoneAbility

1. Opening Address to the Conference

John Suchet, President of Hearing Concern

It is truly a pleasure to be here today, and on behalf of Hearing Concern and PhoneAbility I would like to welcome you all to this seminar, to consider how hard of hearing people, who form one of the largest groups of people with disabilities, are able to use, or not use in many cases, modern telephone systems.

I am delighted to see such a wide range of people, distinguished in their field, here today. We have representatives from the telephone industry. We have manufacturers. We also have academics. And I believe we even have a guest here today from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. I would like to thank you all for being here today, and indeed for finding it. It took me awhile. I should have aimed for the canal and kept going!

I am delighted that BT has offered to sponsor this seminar as part of its celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Age and Disability Action team. This team was set up in 1984 to continue the good work that BT were already doing, and to counter fears that, on privatisation, BT would forget its disabled customers in its drive for profits.

We believe that including, not excluding, their older or disabled customers is the way BT maintain profits. On behalf of all hard of hearing people, I should like to thank BT for their efforts, which have set the target for other commercial companies to follow.

Many of you will know Hearing Concern, the only charity dedicated solely to improving the quality of life for those who are hard of hearing. Many of you here will have heard me say this before, and I make no apologies for saying it again for those of you here who might be less familiar with Hearing Concern. But Hearing Concern is a charity OF hard of hearing people, not FOR hard of hearing people. It is the only major hard of hearing charity that can be described in that way.

Every person from Hearing Concern here today has a personal commitment to getting things done. Many of you will have heard of Hearing Concern. Some of you may not be so familiar with PhoneAbility, which is an independent group of experts concerned with policy development with regard to all aspects of disability and telecommunications, and who are working with Hearing Concern to make this seminar today possible.

You will notice that we have speech to text and lipspeaker support for this meeting, as well as an inductive coupling loop. This degree of communication support is necessary to ensure that hard of hearing people can participate fully in the proceedings, and it is now policy for all Hearing Concern public meetings.

I am now going to let you into a little secret. Why the title for this seminar? " Is anyone answering, now?"

In 1990, the Commission of the European Communities, under its COST 219 project Future Telecommunication and Teleinformatics Facilities for Disabled people, that's a newscaster test if ever I read one, issued a report that reviewed the needs of hard of hearing people who wish to use the telephone. It was concerned with amplification, the coupling of hearing aids to the telephone, the availability of suitable telephones and the need for further research.

The title of this report was " Is anyone answering?"

Technology has moved on, so that we have digital hearing aids, digital telephones available, and we believe the time is now ripe to review the situation, to consider if the ten years that have passed have produced significant benefits, and time once again to look to the future. Hence the question, "Is anyone answering, now?"

Indeed, ten years ago, who possibly could have predicted where we would be now. There has been nothing short of a revolution in the communications industry. Indeed, it is not much more than ten years ago that I was an ITN reporter, and my first task when arriving on a location somewhere in the UK to cover a story was to find the nearest telephone box.

My next most important question was, "Have I got enough 2p coins in my pocket to phone the office?" I can tell you, when I was working with a camera crew, if I admitted to them, "I haven't got a 2p piece," I wouldn't hear the end of it for weeks to come!

You can imagine the problem of arriving, say, to cover a story of power lines brought down by a heavy snowfall in the remote north of Scotland. How on earth do you contact the office? No telephones, even if you have got the 2p pieces.

You can imagine, if the story was difficult in the Highlands of Scotland, how difficult it would have been when you were traveling abroad to cover stories.
I remember in my early days going to Bangladesh to cover a refugee crisis. The only way to get the film back to London was to go to the airport at Dacca to queue with the British Airways passengers flying home that night and to plead with one of them to take this can of film back so it could be on News at Ten tomorrow night.

You would be standing there looking scruffy, carrying a taped-up silver can. " Please would you carry this back. It's film for ITN tomorrow night." They would say, "How do I know it's film?" I would say, "Do you know Sandy Gall, or Alistair Burnett." They would want to know if it was drugs. They would say, "Prove it, open the can." If I opened the can, the film would be ruined.

The very piece that I got, it was a very strong story, I finally persuaded someone in the British Airways line to carry it back for the next night's News at Ten. Needless to say, it never reached London. It probably ended up in a bin at Heathrow Airport, and who can blame them?

Now, Iraq, Afghanistan, the remotest desert in the world, you set up your video satellite telephone and beam the pictures straight back to ITN. So how things have changed in little more than ten years. Here at home, there is not a street or a street corner or a doorway without someone standing there apparently talking to themselves!

The mobile phone, once a dream, has now taken over our lives, and it has made people who are deaf and hard of hearing feel all the more excluded from modern life, and one of the aims of today's seminar is to try to reverse that inevitable feeling of exclusion.

Today's programme includes presentations from leading people from the many sectors represented by you, the participants. We believe that we have drawn together the expertise today for us all to obtain a rounded picture of where we stand, and where we are going.

I wish you all a very productive day.

Back to Contents

Next Page