Q&A: How do you make phone calls?

How do you make telephone calls? Do you have hearing people call for you?


The short answer is to say I don't make phone calls to have conversations with friends. It's always a business purpose and with a text-based phone system.

The long answer is to say I don't use the phone the way hearing people do, but I can make phone calls. I have used a voice carry over phone in the past but nowdays I use an internet relay service. I type through a web browser or phone app, operator voices my text to "Bob" and operator will type to me what Bob said.

I asked my friend to participate in a sample conversation and she made a classic mistake. If you receive a call from a deaf/hoh person using relay phone call, speak TO them, not AT them.

"Tell her..." is a big no-no, it's rude and disrespectful. You're speaking to me, you're not having a conversation to the operator, I'm right there speaking to you in almost real-time (there is a lag during the relay process) but this mistake happens with almost every phone call I make to businesses and even with friends/family. What drives people to do this? When people speak to a German person using a translator/interpreter, do they look at the German, or the interpreter?

This conversation might be hard to follow after the fact, but it's easy to follow along while you're on the phone because the new text scrolls down.

GA = "Go Ahead

SK = "Stop keying"

I have used hearing people to make phone calls for me simply because they can get the task accomplished faster and without the risk of being hung up on or businesses refusing to speak to me. It's actually against ADA to refuse phone calls from deaf people using relay service, but most businesses don't know this is discrimination and illegal. It's frustrating because half the time, the only way I can get anything done is by going into the business in person--I should be able to handle my business tasks with the same access as hearing people, but that's not the case. Using a hearing person to handle my phone calls is also frustrating. Despite being there in front of them, inevitably, something I want to say gets left out because I'm not in control of how the conversation goes or when it ends. 

So that's how I make phone calls. It's a combination of text-based relay calls and occasionally my husbands calls on my behalf

There is such a thing as video relay calls where Deaf people can use ASL + interpreter over video to call hearing people. I've never used this service so I won't try to explain it more in depth. There's also video-video communication between Deaf and/or ASL-fluent hearing people without the need for any interpreters or operators. E.g. Webcam, Facetime, Skype, etc. There are other ways for other Deaf people to make phone calls (The classic TTY/TTD is another example) but I don't use them.

I'd much rather stick to communicating with friends through e-mails or text messages which is easy to do since everyone is "addicted" to technology now, but sometimes I need to call businesses.