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Telephone Solutions for the Hearing-Impaired

Hearing impairment has many levels, as does vision loss. One or both ears can be affected. Loss can be broad spectrum, across all frequencies, or it can be focused in a narrow band. Telephones have never been a high-fidelity sound medium, and without visual clues like lip-reading, the hearing-impaired person can often find phone conversation difficult. A variety of options exist to make telephone technology more accessible to the hard-of-hearing user.

  1. Amplifiers

    • Line amplifiers and telephones with extended volume adjustment options are available for use with hearing loss. Devices of this kind do not require hearing aids to be effective, and provide a simple solution for improved performance. More expensive devices may incorporate features to enhance clarity, accenting speech definition frequencies. Clarity, Ultratec and ClearSounds are three manufacturers who provide amplified and clarity-enhanced telephones.

    TTY and VCO Services

    • TTY (teletype) and VCO (voice carry over) services incorporate text into the telephone medium for the caller whose hearing is compromised. Using relays through teletype operators, the hearing-impaired person can type to the relay operator, who then communicates verbally with the other party and returns data through text (TTY). Or the hard-of-hearing caller can speak and the relay operator replies into captioning (VCO). TTY is generally used by the profoundly deaf and VCO by those with partial loss and good speech skills.

    Telephone Coils

    • For users who are fitted with hearing aids, the oldest dedicated technology for use with phones is the telephone coil, or T-coil. A hearing aid is switched to a special mode where the electromagnetic properties of the telephone handset speaker induces a signal in the T-coil, rather than through microphones, which may feed back when covered by the phone's earpiece. The induced signal is converted to sound by the hearing aid, and the user can carry on a conversation normally. In the United States, cell phones are required to incorporate T-coil technology.

    Bluetooth and FM Systems

    • The advent of Bluetooth technology opens up new options, but as of 2010, no hearing aids directly incorporate Bluetooth directly. A mixture of Bluetooth, FM and T-coil technology does exist and provides a hearing aid user with a very clear signal. A Bluetooth-enabled FM transmitter receives the signal from a cell phone and broadcasts to a receiver worn around the neck of the hearing aid wearer, converting the signal to an induction loop in the lanyard of the device for T-coil pickup. As Bluetooth filters line noise, the resulting T-coil sound is much clearer than through conventional T-coil use.

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