Assistive Technology
Accessibility of telecommunications services among people with hearing or speech disabilities
Mercury Research carried out for ANCOM a quantitative study regarding the accessibility of people with hearing or speech impairments to various communications services.
- Most of the respondents know about video communication devices (54%) and 76% of those who know about them use them. Next in the top are devices for gesture voice technologies (known by 26% of respondents, but used by only 27% of those who know about them).
- 30% of respondents do not know about any of these products.
- Respondents find out about products, services and features for people with disabilities mainly from associations of people with disabilities (54%), or from other people with similar disabilities (51%).
- Even though most assistive technology products are not used by many respondents, these are all considered quite useful: on a scale from 1 (not at all useful) to 10 (very useful), all products have averages above 7.5.
- All products are mostly purchased from family/friends/acquaintances or from a physical store in Romania.
- The average amount paid by users for assistive technology products varies from the lowest (30 lei for DeafBlind communicator and for Automatic Speech Recognition in capture systems) to the highest (400 lei for video communication devices).
- There are three important reasons why respondents did not buy each of the assistive technology products presented: they had nowhere to buy, the expensive price or these products were not right for them
- The video call mediation service is known by half of the respondents. This service is not attractive to answer if it would cost 1 leu per minute: on a scale from 1 (not at all likely to use it) to 10 (very likely to use it), the average of the answers is 3.8.
The study was conducted between January and May 2017.