THE AFTER HOURS MEETING of HLAA – SARASOTA/MANATEE
“After Hours” is the evening chapter meeting for members and guests who are unable to attend during the day. Of course, all members and guests are welcome! By the way, cheese, snacks and products of Napa and Sonoma are served!
AFTER HOURS MEETING RECAP
“After Hours” is the evening chapter meeting for members and guests who are unable to attend during the day. Of course, all members and guests are welcome! Next year’s schedule will appear in the December Listen!Up.
Our speaker in October was Elissa Moran, Outreach Manager for Florida Telecommunications Relay (FTRI), who spoke about the latest FREE technology offered by FTRI to Florida residents. See https://www.ftri.org for more information.
Elissa explained that the FTRI statute, the Telecommunications Access System Act of 1991, also known as TASA was passed in 1992 and has never been updated. Elissa had been the Director of the State of Maine’s Telecommunication Relay Service and talked about what could be done with updated legislation as occurs in many states.
This failure has created challenges for FTRI service to seniors and those with hearing loss, as the technology they can address is limited.
Automatic speech recognition was a topic resulting in much discussion and that led
into current FCC rulemaking. Cable companies are taking a position that their phones are not “phones” and they need not contribute to the phone tax fund that provides for captioning on phones such as CaptionCall and CapTel. The captioning is not free and is charged at $1.96 a minute (why we put captions OFF when we are on hold). An adverse ruling could detrimentally affect our free phone captioning.
Members commented on HLAA’s efforts on this issue. HLAA states: “HLAA and several national consumer organizations, as well as research organizations, filed comments with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regarding IP CTS (Internet Protocol Captioned Telephone Services). HLAA spearheaded these efforts because we know how important IP CTS is to many of you.”
The comment period ended October 16, but you can link to https://www.hearingloss.org/hlaa-files-comments-with-fcc-regarding-ip-cts/ for more information on this. Also, see the Listen!Up story below in Loud and Clear.
Join us – the room is looped and CART, too!