Data Phones and the hearing impaired

Ok, I just know that I'm about to use up my quota of exclamation points for the week in this post. I've put up with this lack of hearing aid compatibility in cell phones for years now and I'm tired of it. Sure, the US government mandated that all cell phones must be hearing aid compatible, but most manufacturers are only obeying this law half-heartedly, while some have ignored it altogether.

I'm a UI designer and want to keep up-to-date on what's happening with the design of mobile devices, and the best way to do that is to own one and use it. Well, good luck trying to do that if you wear hearing aids, as I do.

My old LG 8350 flip phone, the first cell phone I've been able to hear on, finally bit the dust, and being a Verizon customer, I thought it would be good to give the new HTC Droid Eris a try. This is an excellent data toy -- the phone part of the data phone seems secondary, and the Sense UI is intuitive and fun to use. This would be fine, except that it's rated M3/T3 which is really surprising because I can barely hear with full volume. My LG was rated M4/T4 and it was clear as a bell. The difference between these 2 is amazing.

So, I returned the Droid Eris, and bought the Motorola Droid, which I returned the following day as the volume was even worse.

I thought about going over to AT&T and getting an iPhone, but to my amazement, Apple was able to get around the hearing aid compatibility law entirely! How can that be? How can Apple, who pioneered usability and accessibility on the Mac, even consider not making their phone hearing aid compatible??!! I've been a serious Mac user since the mid-80s and right now I'm very pissed at Apple! This isn't right.

So, I'm back to a basic phone, the updated model of my previous phone, an LG 8360, which is an excellent phone if you aren't in need of data or a good UI. LG seems to be seriously involved in making sure their phones have superior voice quality and plenty of volume. Thanks, LG!!

For those of you who aren't aware of this, TTY is NOT usually an option for hearing impaired people, it is for deaf people. I have been hearing impaired most of my life and wear high powered digitial aids (which, by the way, cost upwards of $5,000.00 a pair, to add insult to, uh, injury). I find myself having to educate people, even the sales people at Verizon and the Apple store (please stop saying "It has TTY" when I'm standing there talking to you -- if I needed TTY, I'd probably be signing, but then you wouldn't know what I was saying anyway).

The other thing that really bothers me about this whole cell phone hearing aid compatibility thing is that it seems that the assumption is that if you are hearing impaired you are either also at least partially blind or very, very old, so you need really big lighted buttons on your phone. This is true of landline phones as well -- try buying an amplified phone that doesn't have 1"x1" buttons on it! Isn't it possible to be hearing impaired and stylish too?!

I saw an episode of Glee recently where everyone had to spend their day, for weeks at a time, in a wheelchair to see what it was like. I'd like to do that, with hearing aids, to phone designers/engineers. Actually, I can't believe those people who are wearing Bluetooth phones in their ear these days, because it's totally ironic that someone would choose to stick a piece of plastic in their ear all day. I've been wearing a piece of plastic in my ears for 15-18 hours a day for decades. I can't wait to take them off at night (when I won't hear a fire alarm or a burglar breaking in).

I'd like to hear (no pun intended) from others who are experiencing similar issues with hearing and cell phones. What can we do to push manufacturers to improve the sound quality and give us enough volume? How many of us are out there, missing out on this?
Gary Bastoky