GATINEAU – The development and deployment of a next-generation 911 network (NG911) is perhaps most critical for Canadians who are unable to use the conventional call-based system.
Several groups representing the blind, vision impaired, deaf and hard of hearing told the CRTC on Thursday they need new tools to effectively communicate with 911 call centres in times of emergency.
They noted that while text with 911 is one such tool, it’s not very effective now. The T911 service was created as a measure to allow deaf and hard of hearing individuals to contact emergency call centres. But because of delayed response times and mandatory registration, it has seen little success. A better option would be text to 911, a real-time service that would result in much quicker response times.
Survey results presented by Deaf Wireless Canada illustrate just how little text with 911 is being used by deaf Canadians. According to the findings, 30% didn’t know they were required to register to take advantage of the service. A further 27% believed the process too complicated to bother and 57% pointed to problems with with the service.
Lisa Anderson-Kellet, chair of the committee, explained that the preferred method of 911 communication for those surveyed would be an application on a mobile device. The pressing of a single app icon was preferred by 33% of respondents. Nearly a quarter of those surveyed (24%) wanted the ability to directly text 911. This is different than text with 911 because the latter involves a wait time of up to two minutes during which if no response from the PSAP operator is received, the caller is to text 911 again.
Another promising application that is being developed in the United States, but not yet in Canada is real time text (RTT) functionality (it’s similar to chatting applications) that would be much more effective for people who are hard of hearing or deaf. Testing and deployment of is expected to take place in the U.S. over the next few years.
Deaf and hard of hearing groups called on the CRTC to create a fund for the development of accessibility solutions for telecom services. Similar to the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund (BAF), the Telecommunications Accessibility Fund (TAF) could help support initiatives to make 911 more accessible to person’s with disabilities.
“The funding must be national to provide urban and rural communities and it will also provide support for these resources for such important projects such as community educational workshops with simplified, updated short, quick and step by step informational and educational videos that are critical and distribute widely in ASL and LSQ video blogs,” said Frank Folino, president of the Canadian Association of the Deaf. (ASL and LSQ are sign languages in English and French, respectively.)
One member of the Media Access Canada (MAC) panel highlighted the importance of new technologies in being able to help not only person’s with disabilities but the broader Canadian population.
“I feel like a lot of things that will come in if we look at them in a broader framework, who could benefit from this – new Canadians or people with disabilities, someone who’s just frightened and can’t communicate,” said Kim Kilpatrick from the Canadian Council of the Blind. “The accessibility of things helps everybody in society.”
