One of these days, you might get a phone call that starts out like this:
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“You are receiving a call from Missouri Relay. Have you ever had a relay call before?”
Don’t hang up. It’s not an aluminum siding salesman or a 7-year-old amusing himself. It’s an operator who is the line of communication between the nation’s deaf and hard-of-hearing people and the rest of us. Given enough patience on the other end, hearing-impaired people can talk to anyone with access to a telephone.
It wasn’t always so. People with hearing disorders only began to be able to use the telephone system when the invention of the text telephone, or TTY, about 35 years ago. The TTY resembles a small typewriter and can send a written message over a telephone line to be displayed on a screen on the receiving TTY.
It constituted a great leap forward, but it had definite limitations. Those with access to a TTY could only call other people with access to a TTY. That, of course, left out the vast majority of us.
Another great revolution in telecommunications for the deaf came with the first stirrings of the “relay” system about 20 years ago. Telephone operators are equipped with computers that can receive text telephone messages. The operators serve as middlemen, translating the typing into speech for the hearing person and the speech into type for the hearing-impaired party.
The relay system was first used during limited hours or for certain types of calls such as business communications. In 1987, California introduced the first full-time service. The system was kicked into high gear with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. It required that all telephone companies provide relay service.
Now, there is a relay system in operation in every state except for Arkansas.
Communicating by relay is a slow process with little room for spontaneity, and . . . it is necessary . . . to pause frequently so that . . . the operator is not . . . overwhelmed.
Despite its limitations, Bonnie Banks has found relay to be a boon. For many years, the Olathe, Kan., woman did speak on the phone, even though she couldn’t hear.
The relay system has improved things, even though the communication can be somewhat choppy, as in Banks’ responses during a telephone interview:
“Before the relay services . . . I had to use my voice . . . to seek help with the ambulance . . . I had to answer calls . . .to the business people . . . that phoned . . . some had patience . . . and others didn’t . . . when I told them . . . that I was deaf . . . and was not really able to talk over the phone . . . or really understand them . . . they’d hang up on me . . . but . . . not . . . the emergency uses . . . they had great patience with me.
“Now I’m able to use . . . the relay . . . with anyone . . . I have a part-time business . . . at my home . . . and I use the relay service . . . to call the hearing people . . . and it does wonders.”
The Federal Communications Commission regulates relay services, and it places a high priority on maintaining confidentiality in these three-way conversations.
“Everything the operators hear in relay is supposed to go in one ear and out the other,” said James Fisher, a spokesman in Washington for Sprint PCS, which provides relay service in several states. “They forget about it. They don’t talk about it.”
In the course of interpreting phone conversations, operators are instructed to strive for invisibility “so the customer senses he or she is talking to the person he is calling and vice versa,” Fisher said. To that end, some operators will not answer a question from one of the parties, even if it is directed specifically at the operator.
Operators vary dramatically in their approach and skill, and Virginia Beach said she appreciates “a good relay operator.” That would be someone with “the ability to type quickly, to keep up with the conversation.” When an operator interjects to ask something be repeated, “It sort of irritates you when you’re in a train of thought,” said Beach, who lives in Kansas City, Kan., with her husband, Steve Koontz.
Beach gets lots of opportunities to compare and contrast, as she estimates she makes perhaps 10 calls a day.
When they began courting, Koontz was a little skittish at the specter of “someone else listening in on our conversations,” said Beach, who can speak in a well-modulated but high-pitched voice but cannot hear. “We got to the point where we were having all kinds of conversations over the relay.
“It really allowed us to maintain our relationship. We’ve said, `I love you,’ gotten into fights, argued about money and our animals, argued about what color going to paint the kitchen. It’s so immersed into our lives now, we don’t even think about it.”