October 18, 2004
Deaf Benefit Greatly from SMS
Research out of Australian universities on text-based mobile messaging could herald good news for the deaf in the United States -- if cellular carriers can agree to improve interoperability between networks, reports Wired.
"A joint research project between Australia's Bond and Griffith universities has found the deaf community is a major beneficiary of the mobile text-messaging craze. In Australia, more than 50 percent of the general population sends at least one text message a day. The result is a nearly universal, text-based communications medium that connects the deaf to the hearing world.
While the craze has been a boon to Australia's deaf, things are not as simple in the United States. Network interoperability issues have stunted the growth of SMS in the United States, meaning many mobile handsets in the country are simply incapable of messaging each other. (Is this true, US carriers are still not interoperable for text messaging?)
The report by Australian researchers found that in the United States and Canada, deaf people are sending text messages mainly to each other through two-way pagers".
For related articles on how Text Messaging has been a god-send to Deaf or hearing impaired mobile users, click on this category in Textually.org.
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