deafbiz.com

I learned about this new service from LifeHacker

Keep in mind that this is for making hearing phone calls as you can use it from your mobile phone or if your computer is capable of making phone calls from the browser. It’s a useful tool to minimize wasting minutes on the cell phone and aggravation with phone menus.

Fonolo uses a patented process called “Deep Dialing”.  Fonolo works by automating the nativiation through the dreaded touch-tone menus. (”Press 1 for English…”)

Instead, you navigate a company’s phone menu visually, through a web or mobile interface.

Just click the point in the menu you need to call and fonolo will automatically dial the company, navigate to that point and then connect you to the call.

For those using Relay Services, this is a handy guide to prep you for the phone menu so that you can decide ahead of time which numbers to press for the right services.

For example, here’s what it would look like if you plan to call AOL:

Main menu

Main Menu

Hi. Thanks for calling AOL.

This call may be monitored or recorded for quality service.

[click to expand] Main Menu:

To get to the right place, just say one of these:

“Reset password,”

“Tech support,”

“Billing,”

“Sign up,” or,

“Cancellations.”

If nothing sounds right, say “It’s none of those.”

Right now, they’re limited to a small number of companies since it’s in Beta mode. Fonolo built a system that “spiders” the phone system, much like a web search engine spiders the web. Fonolo dial companies, navigate their menus and use a combination of voice recognition, signal processing and human editing to maintain a map of phone space. Since phone menus can change any time, Fonolo continually spider each company to keep the database current.

Not a bad idea to reduce your time on Relay Services (but of course a bad idea for Relay Services because that’ll mean less money for them, heh).

Fonolo

Start reading here but this is a best comment so far:

A couple of years ago, our department manager combined this training as an afternoon extension to a departmental all-hands meeting. One of my close friends is a very articulate, knowledgeable lady who is deaf. Or perhaps I should say, was deaf. She has cochlear implants that now allow her to hear.

So, we were into the second hour of the training when I noticed that she had turn her implants off and was playing solitaire on her Palm Pilot.

The instructor liked to use her as an example of someone with a “special condition”. Whenever he spoke her name, I’d give her a nudge and she’d look up, smile at the instructor and then go back to playing solitaire.

I had to suffer through the training—I’d left my Palm Pilot in my cube.

Another brave Israeli soldier killed. This one is different - his parents are deaf.

At first glance, the hundreds of mourners gathered at the Ashkelon military cemetery Sunday for the funeral of Israel Defense Forces Staff Sergeant Liran Banai seemed to display both agility and morbid curiosity as they climbed every available surface in a scramble to get a good view of the proceedings next to the freshly dug grave. But then the reason became clear: Many of the mourners were deaf. They came to the funeral in a show of solidarity with Banai’s parents, Guy and Gila, both of whom are deaf, and wanted to find a spot from which they could read the lips of the eulogizers. Due to the mass of mourners in attendance, however, few succeeded.

Rest of the story…

Here’s more details of Liran Banai. He didn’t have to serve in combat because he has deaf parents, but he wanted to.

Magen David Adom is Israel’s equivalent of Red Cross. They just came out with a new services allowing deaf/hard of hearing to call for help by texting MDA dispatch, as reported in Ynetnews.

Text messages received at Magen David Adom’s central dispatch will be immediately displayed on a plasma screen along with a vocal alert to on-call staff. The new service will also allow MDA staff to send a text message back, informing the original sender that help is on the way.

Some 650,000 people living in Israel are hearing impaired. In accordance with the instructions of Magen David Adom’s Chief Medical Officer, Eli Bin, the new text service will be taking over for the fax service MDA introduced a decade ago.

The text service, like the fax service before it, is considered a breakthrough in emergency services’ accessibility.

Will be real handy for the next wave of suicide bombers or rockets coming from Gaza, West Bank, or Lebanon. And no, I’m not being sarcastic.

The Case of the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker

A few months ago, a prospective patient called the office of Andrew Brooks, a top-ranked orthopedic surgeon in Los Angeles. She was having serious knee trouble, and she was also deaf. She wanted to know if her deafness posed a problem for Brooks. He had his assistant relay a message: no, of course not; he could easily discuss her situation using knee models, anatomical charts and written notes.

The woman later called again to say she would rather have a sign-language interpreter. Fine, Brooks said, and asked his assistant to make the arrangements. As it turned out, an interpreter would cost $120 an hour, with a two-hour minimum, and the expense wasn’t covered by insurance. Brooks didn’t think it made sense for him to pay. That would mean laying out $240 to conduct an exam for which the woman’s insurance company would pay him $58 — a loss of more than $180 even before accounting for taxes and overhead.

So Brooks suggested to the patient that they make do without the interpreter. That’s when she told him that the Americans With Disabilities Act (A.D.A.) allowed a patient to choose the mode of interpretation, at the physician’s expense. Brooks, flabbergasted, researched the law and found that he was indeed obliged to do as the patient asked — unless, that is, he wanted to invite a lawsuit that he would probably lose.

If he ultimately operated on the woman’s knee, Brooks would be paid roughly $1,200. But he would also then need to see her for eight follow-up visits, presumably with the $240 interpreter each time. By the end of the patient’s treatment, Brooks would be solidly in the red.

He went ahead and examined the woman, paying the interpreter out of his pocket. As it turned out, she didn’t need surgery; her knee could be treated through physical therapy. This was a fortunate outcome for everyone involved — except, perhaps, for the physical therapist who would have to pay the interpreter’s bills.

Brooks told several colleagues and doctor friends about his deaf patient. “They all said, ‘If I ever get a call from someone like that, I’ll never see her,’ ” he says. This led him to wonder if the A.D.A. had a dark side. “It’s got to be widely pervasive and probably not talked about, because doctors are just getting squeezed further and further. This kind of patient will end up getting passed on and passed on, getting the runaround, not understanding why she’s not getting good care.”

So does the A.D.A. in some cases hurt the very patients it is intended to help? That’s a hard question to answer with the available medical data. But the economists Daron Acemoglu and Joshua Angrist once asked a similar question: How did the A.D.A. affect employment among the disabled?

Their conclusion was rather startling and makes Andrew Brooks’s hunch ring true. Acemoglu and Angrist found that when the A.D.A. was enacted in 1992, it led to a sharp drop in the employment of disabled workers. How could this be? Employers, concerned that they wouldn’t be able to discipline or fire disabled workers who happened to be incompetent, apparently avoided hiring them in the first place.

Of course, if they had a UbiDuo, none of this would be a problem anymore!