Deaf Phone Users Go High-Tech to Reach Out

A year ago, Mark Elderkin had this brainstorm:

Computers the size of a paperback book were hitting the market, able to do almost everything a laptop could--including hook up to a modem, and thus the world. Add a cellular phone connection, and you’ve got a portable office, capable of sending and receiving e-mail, faxes and pages, and connecting with the Internet. Everything an on-the-go executive could want.

But who else might want these things?

Elderkin’s answer: the deaf.

Elderkin’s brainstorm has borne splendid fruit--a cellular phone for the deaf, created and sold by RadioMail, the company where he was director of marketing. And it serves as a textbook example of how out-of-the-box thinking can lead to profit and progress.

Since the introduction of telecommunication devices for the deaf, or TDDs, in the 1970s, deaf Americans have used small keyboards with one-line digital displays to talk to each other via the phone lines.

But TDDs are expensive, not portable and they can talk only to other TDDs--problems a palmtop computer-modem-cellular phone doesn’t have.

Elderkin’s company had first introduced nationwide wireless Internet services four years ago, plugging a modem about half the size of a cigarette package into a laptop computer. Without too much trouble, he thought, the service could be adapted for the deaf.

Before Elderkin left RadioMail in 1996, he handed the idea off to marketing manager Judy Leigh, who set out to make it happen.

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When she studied the problem, she realized the technology was almost entirely in place. Radio Mail users already got an account that sent and received pages, faxes and e-mail. Because the account is always “on,” subscribers didn’t have to wait for their computers to boot up or their Internet connections to log on. In those respects, RadioMail was just like a phone.

“This is a perfect example of what universal design can do,” said Betsy Bayha, director of technology policy at the World Institute on Disability in Oakland, Calif.

“Something that’s designed to be flexible for the businessperson on the go becomes something that can also be extremely useful for people who need visual communication because they can’t use the telephone.”

It’s also a huge market. At 23 million, the deaf and hard-of-hearing make up 10% of the U.S. population. “And it’s only getting larger as people get older and their hearing diminishes,” Bayha said. To reach that market, the San Mateo, Calif.-based company faced two hurdles: cost and trust. Of the two, cost was the easiest.

“Originally, RadioMail billed by the number of messages sent, because that made sense for executives. But for the deaf community, who would use it more as a phone, we needed a different billing structure,” Leigh said.

So they developed new pricing based on the number of characters sent. Leigh said most of the service’s deaf customers opt for the moderate plan, which bundles in the modem rental to bring the service up to about $79 a month.

“That’s still cheaper than two-way paging, and much cheaper than most people pay for cellular phones,” she said.

Add a Hewlett Packard 200LX palmtop computer, which weighs about 19 ounces and costs around $500, and the physical requirements are met.

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Trust was the more difficult hurdle. The deaf community has always been wary of an often autocratic hearing world that treated them as children to be managed.

“You just get inundated with hearing people who know what’s best for you. They say ‘This is going to work for you.’ . . . Well, who are they say that?” said Lisa Rogers, a deaf attorney who consulted with RadioMail on its approach to the deaf community.

To build trust, Leigh’s team spent months revamping RadioMail to make it “deaf-friendly.”

The payoff came this November in Anaheim, at Deaf Expo, the world’s largest consumer trade show targeted at the deaf and hard-of-hearing.

“We thought we’d be in shifts, but we decided that we would all meet in the booth and be there for the first hour. But none of us ever left! We couldn’t even go to the bathroom. Even the [sign language] interpreters got pulled in to helping,” Rogers said.

Since the introduction, various deaf community leaders have been trying out the product and sales are climbing, Leigh said.