PhoneAbility

4. How the Telecommunications Industry is Meeting the Needs of the Hearing Aid Wearer

4a. Mobile communication - David Dzumba, Senior Manager, Global Accessibility, Nokia

We work out of the Dallas Fort Worth area of the United States. I want to run through how we are organised in our company for accessibility. Our group is basically in the research and development area of the company. There are sometimes different areas which house the organisations, ours being part of the research and development organisation. It puts us closer to product development, closer to research opportunities that are maybe two to five years down the road, which we call advanced development activities, and that allows us to kind of be part of the support phase on the products after they are launched on to the market. It kind of works well that way, we think.

Just quickly, a little background on improvements in access. You maybe familiar with the Nokia loop sets. We have loop sets LPS1 through 4. The different numbers basically mean they work with different interfaces of different models of handsets.

What we have been doing is taking advantage of some of the quality improvements and some of the different technology changes in the products. With the LPS4, the idea of that is it uses the batteries from the phone and doesn't require any batteries. What consumers have said is the previous versions of the LPS required three hearing aid batteries each. They aren't cheap and, as they wear down and you replace them frequently, it's expensive. It's moving those technologies along, hopefully in the right direction.

Motorola has loopsets, and there are a variety of third party companies that have some devices. We have some adaptors that hook to our phones that allow connectivity to textphone TTY devices in the US. We have some capabilities in the handsets, in our case we use Baudot tones, so it passes them to the TTY devices.

This morning we talked a lot about the hearing aid compatibility issues. I am going to spend a little more time on that as we go through. I think that kind of seems to be the top issue in a lot of areas in the world. It's big in the US because of the regulations and legislation. I have read the INCOM reports, and some of the different reports from consumer organisations in Asia and Europe, so it is probably one of our top priorities right now to try to resolve that. I will go through what ANSI is, and what some of the impact is on our company.

We have another development in there, for the mild to moderate hearing loss. The speaker before me talked about Sound ID. That's whom we are working with. We have a project in work right now in which we are looking to take that technology into the handset. The HAC activities require solutions for hearing aids, T-coil hearing aids, cochlear implants. Another side of the market is mild to moderate hearing loss. That's specifically what that's working with. We are looking at adding that solution into the handset. We have a lead programme in work in which we are trying to see how technically it works. I am giving you a little bit of foresight of where we are going. Sometimes it depends on how it works technically.

The next thing is moving forward without wires. Bluetooth is on our plans, to take away the wire from the present loopset down to the mobile device. Now you just have a loop that you would wear around your neck, so it works pretty well.

Mobile terminated text telephony. There is a solution here from RNID that works on the communicator presently. We are looking at some of the same solutions in the US, although the technologies and the standards are different. You have V21 solution in the UK. In the US we have a Baudot solution. It's just 45 baud. That's sort of the standard in the US.

We have features in the products that we try to keep. When you advance on to other technologies, you want to look at Bluetooth or GPRS, or other technologies, but some of the core things we try to keep in the products are the issues of phones that vibrate, flash, or have some kind of indicator that they have a call. Ringing tones -- there's just a multitude of things in the devices now. We don't want to lose those things as the technology moves forward.

We have what we think are four major areas for accessibility:
a) specifically direct accessibility, and how we deal with that is that we have standard product requirements or guidelines. Our company has basically eight standard products -- things that are environmental issues and mechanical issues. There is one called accessibility. Mainly what we encompass are the universal design concepts.

We are not building specific products for segments of the market. We want to make sure we kind of retain some of the universal design concepts when we start to design a product. If it's used in Beijing, Southwood or Dallas, anywhere in the world, they have to review those requirements. There may be there are some things you cannot do. Maybe the market you are going for does not require some things. It's an idea to ensure that the companies and engineering organisations are looking at those.

We have round keypads. We have numbers that go around the screen. We have keyboard-type devices with the screen between them. So the issue of that isn't to say you have to design everything with a 3 by 4 design. The idea of those things is to allow creativity, design, flexibility within the engineering organisations, but try to retain some of those things. The nib on the 5 is an issue. It's a nib, or a tip. We want to make sure there is some technical spec that can be measured and adhered to on products.

b) Accessibility of the standard options or accessories. We have loopsets. With the opening up of imported products, there are other companies with accessories that can be adapted. In the US, we have adaptors that TTY devices can be connected to.

c) The third item would be compatibility with third party assistive devices. One of the areas we are working on is to make sure the software in the products is available. You hear things about Series 60 different platforms, the open platforms. We want to make sure we continue to keep open access to that information so that third party developers can develop the applications. That's one of the big areas we are focusing on now.

We do not have the engineering resources or the staff to go and develop software solutions for every organisation or every consumer group out there. Being involved with issues of vision, mobility, cognitive, hearing, and then the ageing issue over the top of that, we will just never grow that big to be able to do that, so we are working on opening up that information to organisations that can do that. Examples would be RNID and the textphone software. They understand what needs to be done and how to do that. Text to speech for the blind, we will help on technical problems when they cannot access communication through the handset.

d) Lastly, custom modifications i.e. companies who want to drill holes in the phone to access handsets for modification. We do not like people drilling into the handsets. There are issues of warranty etc. It's an area that we have identified, but we do not have a whole lot of experience on what to do in this area.

One of the big opportunity areas is interoperability, to be able to test the system devices with handsets. A lot of companies will say you should put a standard port in your handset. I don't necessarily know if a 2.5 mm socket is standard, some say 3 mm, some say use Bluetooth or USB. You can just continue to go down those avenues, so interoperability is a large and difficult area

Fig.1 Numbers of people affected by the Hearing Aid Compatibility Act

Really, the big area is the hearing aid compatibility issue as indicated in Fig. 7. Everybody is familiar with the talk about the FCC² ruling. I saw the numbers about the 225% of the models have to be available. That is a requirement on the operators. On the manufacturers, we are required to have two handsets per protocol available in the fall of 2005 that meet certain emission levels. The emission levels are specified in the ANSI C63.19 standard "American National Standard for Methods of Measurement between Wireless Communication Devices and Hearing Aids". It talks specifically about how you are going to establish your test plans, how you are going to measure the devices and how you record the specific data on there.

From our standpoint, from Nokia GSM, we have to have just two handsets in the fall of 2005 that will meet the emission levels of U3 rating. In the fall of 2006, we have to have two handsets which meet with the telecoil coupling, UT. The operators have the burden of 25%, and then 50%, and so on. There are some indications it could be 100% of the models out in 2008. That's what they call the analogue sunset date in the US, where the operators don't have to have the capabilities to support analogue devices. They may or may not, depending on what their coverage is.

We have two working groups under the hearing aid organisations run by ATIS. It's an organisation that has taken the responsibility -- we have formed what we call an "incubator", which allows us to focus specifically on the HAC Act, made up of manufacturers, test houses and operators.

We are really just working on the technical solutions. We are looking at the testing, to make sure we can reliably test the same handsets in a variety of test houses and get (2) the same results, so that we can label the boxes. The requirement for labelling is they want a label on the box that would indicate the phone's rating. For example, they want M4, which means it is a microphone that meets ANSI level 3 or 4. The T would be the telecoil coupling requirements for B2, 3, or 4. It's specified in the ANSI it will meet U3 or better. It was hoped you would rate the handsets and hearing aids and get a system number, but this is the direction we have taken.

So, what goes on the box, what kind of information goes in the box, and then the biggest part of it is the outreach. How are we going to communicate to the consumers what to look for? There is a whole lot of discussion on labelling. People want graphics and bar charts. It's an ongoing discussion.

We have projects working on the battery, base band, and looking at the technical issues. Specifically, we are in a test phase, trying to get the ANSI standard finalised. We are trying to get all the test houses to test samples of the devices, so we know where we all stand, and each test house, no matter if they take the same phone to different houses, gets the same results, so that we can label and communicate what that device is.

We have two devices in the fall 2005 and two more in the fall of 2006, but I am not going to run through much more; it's kind of just running. These are just some details about HAC, and a little bit more emphasis. The ramifications of the HAC; these are some of the numbers we have got from there. The HAC Act takes into consideration the four million groups here. We don't want to miss some opportunities we have with the top group. It covers the area from mild to moderate. On the ramifications of some of this from the HAC angle, my concerns are that, when you get regulated into the issue of meeting the ANSI standard, you sometimes result in minimal compliance or incomplete standards.

We have stated that ANSI still has work to do. They just take time. Sometimes we have concerns that, when we do meet and bring all the stuff together, it still may not be the full solution. Again, we have done some testing, ANSI standard and performance experienced. The issue is: is it going to work for the consumer? Once we develop, finish the standard testing and go off and do consumer studies, is it really going to be the answer? I don't know if U3 is going to work as a variety. It may prevent production of proven accessories. We have a number of resources, and we have to direct those people to things that have a timetable directed to us.

Some of the different activities would be some of the tracks of development. Again, we have a HAC Act that is very defining, but we have a lot of issues from section 255, which is encompassing the role in the US, so there is confusion between the different things. We don't want to create adversarial relationship between industry and advocacy groups. Relationships with the groups are good. Sometimes, when you bring them closer, you really can start a dialogue. "I know you have a U3 phone, but it doesn't work so it's obviously not right, and we are going to take it back." This document talks about the timeline, some information you can look at later at your leisure. It takes account of ongoing issues and kind of where we are going.

Finally, we want to make sure that we keep the industry relationships favourable. In my opinion, they are at the moment. There are some good things in the IEC European standards for hearing aid and handset testing that will probably be pretty good. Continue to keep dialogue with hearing aid manufacturers. Continue the development of the activity of Sound ID for mild and moderate hearing loss.

Bundle phones, accessories and services through co-operation. There are parts that we can do, parts the operators and advocacy groups can do. It's making sure everyone takes on their responsibilities to make sure the consumers, at the end of the day, understand what's involved.

Improve awareness. We do not have a good answer all the time. We have some solutions in some of the devices. We do not have a good way in which maybe we communicate that. There is work that we have to do, too, so there are a lot of things we are looking at.

Discussion

MIKE DUXBURY, VODAFONE, AND PHONEABILITY: David, I wanted to add, Nokia has an extremely good, informative accessibility website. Is this an area that maybe Nokia could exploit to deliver the sort of stuff that you are doing, which seems to be very informative, to ensure that the rest of the world really are keeping up to date with the progress that Nokia are making out there?

DAVID DZUMBA: We have a web page www.nokia accessibility.com, in an area in which we are trying to communicate. We also mention about the IEC, and others like that, on the web page.

PATRICK ROE, INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY IN SWITZERLAND: You actually partly answered this, or made reference to it. There was a need to involve users in the testing. Is that not currently done? Did I understand that ANSI are not involving users and, in particular, hard of hearing users at this stage?

DAVID DZUMBA: No. We do. In the past, we have used some focus groups on products that we believe have potential solutions, and then we collect that information and use it for additional research or enhancements into the products.

Some of the newer products we have had some feedback on, maybe adding some equalisation in there. Some devices have equalisers in there. Some things have automatic gain control on the loopsets. Some people maybe don't want the wire, for a variety of reasons: getting out of the car, on the jacket. We have a variety of things.

4b. Fixed Line Communication - Fiona Miller, National Manager, BT Age and Disability

It gives me very great pleasure to be here today and to have been able to sponsor this event.

I am glad to have the opportunity to tell you something more about what the Age & Disability Action Team does and BT's approach to product development. In particular, I hope that I can cover some of the consumer issues, particularly in relation to information and finding the right phone.

Fig.1 BT Age and Disability Action Team structure

So, who are we? The Age & Disability Action Team is a customer-facing team of about 30 people, Fig 8. We are spread all round the country. We have the largest numbers of people in our regional teams from Aberdeen in the North down to

Bournemouth in the South, and we have a smaller communications team looking at guides, websites and accessibility issues. There is also a parallel customer service team in Northern Ireland, who are doing a similar sort of role to our regional team.

It is our 20th year of operation. We are very proud of that. We think we have proved it is not the case that BT would ignore the needs of all of its customers when it became privatised, and that the inclusive approach is actually good for business.
We think, also, that not just amongst telecommunications companies, but amongst businesses generally, we are a unique team. I do not believe that there is anyone else who does anything in the same way that we do.

So what do we do? While we do generate sales for the company, obviously we want people to buy our phones and services; our key role is not about generating revenue. It is about enhancing the reputation of the company, and making sure people understand that we have an inclusive approach; that we have a long tradition of developing products and services that are accessible for people, and that we will continue to do it.

On the one hand, we go out and raise awareness of what BT has to offer in the form of customers, the ambassadors for BT. I will tell you more about that later. We also regularly consult about issues and services.

The other half of what we do is looking at the awareness of disability issues within BT as a whole, raising awareness so that customers can take advantage of our services. We produce guidelines for inclusion and accessibility, so that we can include people, everyone, when we are developing a service.

We are involved in developing training packages, both from the point of view of BT people as a whole in terms of raising disability awareness, and more specifically for community engineers, who may go out and fit a free-of-charge tone caller for a hard-of-hearing customer.

What I would say is that we are not about developing special services, in the same way as David said. We are not about looking at a particular service for a particular group of people. What we are about is ensuring that anyone who wants to access our services is able to access those services.

When a new service or product is being developed, we ask ourselves, "Is that product going to be of particular interest to a particular group of people?" and can we help support it in that way.

BT is a service provider. Nokia is a manufacturer. You will have heard lots of discussions about, "Is it the responsibility of the service provider or the manufacturer to instigate the development of a product?" It really is a chicken-and-egg situation. There is not a perfect answer to this one. There is, I will admit, a lot of buck-passing in this area, but BT has products which are branded BT. As such, it is key that they are developed to the quality and the specification that we actually want, because our reputation can stand or fall by the products that we sell.

Therefore, we do work very closely with the manufacturers who make the telephones for us. Within my team, we have people who act as product representatives. They work closely with our product managers to develop the specifications in order to produce phones that are inclusively designed. We are also able to highlight particular customer requirements to identify particular customer groups, as I said before, and help with the marketing of those products.

As well as being involved with the design and development, we also support product testing. In the early stages, before we want people to actually play with the phones for us, we use them ourselves and test them out. In that way, we can iron out some of the early problems that there might be on a new product. Once the initial concerns have been overcome, we will then involve members of our customer base in helping us with the testing. I think some people have done so in this room.

We also have a Payphones Disability Forum, and we are aiming for 100% of amplification in our street payphones. It's currently running at about 70%, but the aim is to increase that to 100%.

We have also recently established a panel of people from amongst our own employees to help us with looking at new products and services, and testing them out. Our employees are representative of our customers. We have about 45 people on that panel at the moment, and the numbers are growing almost daily.

One of the things that it is important to remember is that we have a wide range of phones. We do recognise people's differing requirements and we recognise that people have different preferences.

The first Converse phones were launched in 1992 and the popular Big Button phone was launched in 1998. Since then, the ranges have developed. Many of the phones have features that can be helpful for people who are hard of hearing, and much of that information is found on our website www.btplc.com/age_disability, we are really rather proud of it. It is an accessible site itself and we have just recently got the accreditation "See it Right" from the RNIB.

We do not aim to put every accessible feature into every product. What we want is for all our customers to have a choice, and there is also a place for a very basic telephone in the market, so we don't aim to put everything into every phone.

In the middle of our stand is the latest phone, the Relate 3000, which we hope will be launched next month. I think a number of people here have been helping us with the testing of that phone.

The specification of that phone was drawn up between the people in A & D and the product managers, specifically from feedback that we get from people on a day-to-day basis. We fully expect it to be another big seller like the Big Button phone because it covers so many different features.

It has incoming and outgoing amplification. It has an optional lock on the amplification as well. It has an inductive coupler, hands-free and headset facilities, ringer tone and volume selection, visual calling etc. We really do think that this is going to be a big high street seller.

One of the issues that was highlighted earlier was about how people find out about phones and how do they choose the phone which best suits them. I have mentioned before that we have a website with information and we also have guides. We go out and actively talk to local groups about the products that are available. I have some examples of things that are going on in the early part of this month.

We are going to lipreading classes in Stoke and Crewe, to audiology teams in Bradford, Retford and Bridlington, as well as talks to groups like the University of the Third Age and Independent Living Centres. That's just a kind of snapshot fairly typical of the types of groups that we go out and talk to. We are actively developing our relationships with professionals like audiologists, occupational therapists and social services, in order to make more people aware of the products that are available.

Our advisers receive about 250 calls a day and our website has resulted in more hits to the BT online shop than any other, so it shows that there is obviously a big demand for this type of product.

Talking about shops, I think you will probably all have recognised the fact that BT no longer has any shops in the high street. A lot of people have said this is a real concern because there is nowhere you can go and actually see the phones. However, we have a network of what we call resource centres throughout the UK, where we donate phones so that people can go and try them before they buy. Currently, we have about 200 locations. This number rises to about 600 if you add in all of the additional individual people that we have loaned phones to in Social Services, etc

To give a couple of examples of the sorts of locations, the Disabled Living Foundation on the Harrow Road in London has phones where you can go and try them out, and the Catholic Caring Services for Deaf People in Carlisle. They are fairly typical examples. The most northerly centre we have is in Thurso. I think we have phones loaned for the new Hearing Concern bus as well. When that goes out and about, phones will be there for people to try.

Although we do not have our own shops now, we do sell to third parties. You will have seen phones in places like Dixons and Argos, for example. We sell to the distributors who then sell through the catalogue accounts. We hold what we call range reviews, where we get all the buyers together, show them all the product range, and then they can choose those types of products which best suit their needs for their particular store or their particular catalogue.

The thing to bear in mind is that, when they are doing their buying, they are looking four to six months out, so they are looking now at the types of products which are possibly in our development portfolio at the moment for something which they can sell in six months` time.

Although we can highlight the features, we can point out the different phones and tell them what the opportunities are, you can't actually force them to buy them. That is one of the difficulties. You have to be aware that it is not through lack of trying that some of the phones are not easily visible in other high street shops now that we do not have our own.

One of the areas that a couple of people have talked about is call steering. We know people dislike call steering, and it is not just hard of hearing people; it is everyone generally. We have to accept, though, that they are not going to go away. They can be useful to the customer, in that they get you to the person who can best answer your call, and they are very useful for businesses. The issue, though, is that they are badly designed in a lot of cases.

BT, together with a lot of other consumer groups, like Hearing Concern, have produced a paper highlighting the barriers that there are for disabled people with call steering. We have done a lot of work of our own within BT to improve the systems. You may well say that there are still improvements we can make, and we probably would agree with you, but the number of options that people have to go through has been reduced and simplified, so you have a better ability to be able to get to where you want. For instance, if you want to get information about a product, you now only have to go through two stages. There is the issue about what happens when you get through to a person, and we are refreshing the disability awareness of all our people in our call centres as well.

Having said that, we have this report about all the different barriers, and we are actively looking for people to come on board with us, to support and jointly sponsor some research into good practice for call steering. If there are any companies here today who would like to join us and help sponsor some research, then please do come and talk to me, because we are keen to get a pan-industry piece of research going.

We are proud of our history and our achievements, but we are not complacent, and we know there is always room for improvement. We are always open to suggestions and ideas. We are looking at new things, new developments, and you will hear about a couple of them later. If you have any other suggestions or thoughts of what we can do better, then please do let us know. We would only be too happy to listen.

Discussion

LARAINE CALLOW, HEARING CONCERN: I was interested in your comment about how do people find out information. This is something that Hearing Concern is always looking at. How do we share information? How do people find you? How do they find us

NEW SPEAKER: I work with Peterborough Social Services as a support technician. I can only say that BT are very accessible when I have to make enquiries of them. I can't think of a better service and back up than we get from that company. When you deal with other phone companies and have to sort out bills through Social Services for people who cannot do it themselves, there are such barriers, but I find BT are absolutely wonderful. I think a lot of people would agree with me. Thank you.

(2) Federal Communication Commission, FCC 03-168, August 14, 2003, Report and Order

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