Helping the hearing impaired make phone calls: T-City improved the communications possibilities for deaf or hearing-impaired people in public areas with Telephony for the Hearing Impaired. The partners of this project are TeSS, the sign language interpreting service, and the “Deutsche Gesellschaft der Hörgeschädigten-Selbsthilfe und Fachverbände” (German Society for the Hearing Impaired). The terminals have an integrated screen, a special camera as well as access to TeSS. By pressing the touch-sensitive screen, a video connection to a sign language interpreter is established, who simultaneously translates the conversation to the conversation partner with normal hearing. In the following two and half years, the application was tested on eight multimedia stations in T-City – two of which have been permanently installed. In agreement with societies for the hearing impaired and TeSS, terminals were set up nation-wide at further selected locations to meet the requirements for this special form of telephony.
