Fitting The Hearing-Impaired

Posted Apr 11, 2007 by Stephen Hammill

Updated Apr 11, 2007 at 04:20 PM

PROGRAM OFFERS PHONES AT KEEL LIBRARY

By STEPHEN HAMMILL
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Several Tampa residents visited the Jimmie B. Keel Regional Library, 2902 W. Bearss Ave., recently in an effort to regain a bit of normalcy in their lives.
Robbyn Walters of the Deaf and Hearing Connection for Tampa Bay was there handing out phones specially designed for the hearing-impaired. Walters is a coordinator for FTRI (Florida Telecommunications Relay Incorporated) and assists in providing the phones to residents. She travels throughout Hillsborough County as the program’s lone outreach representative.

The Deaf and Hearing Connection for Tampa Bay offers specialized telephones and ring signaling devices at no cost to Florida residents who are deaf, hard-of-hearing or speech-impaired. FTRI distributes the equipment to clients. Meanwhile, Sprint carries the Florida Relay service on its network. Through the Florida Relay Service, people who use specialized telephone equipment can communicate with people who use standard telephone equipment.

Walters comes to the library every Tuesday between 9 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. in order to hand out the equipment to the community. There is no appointment required to see her.

“We’re not a phone company; we’re a state-run agency and are nonprofit,” Walters said.

The specialized phones feature manual volume controls plus a tone adjustment, which allows the listener to transform a caller’s voice into a lower or higher-pitched sound.

During her weekly visit, over the course of a few hours, Walters will see anywhere from a handful to a dozen people.

“This is a godsend,” said Nancy Gonzalez. “It’s just wonderful.” Nancy’s husband, Victor, is hard-of-hearing; in fact, he is deaf in his right ear.
“And my left ear is 95 percent gone,” he added. Victor Gonzalez has been partially deaf since childhood.

The couple, approaching 39 years of marriage, moved here from New York about nine months ago. There were no special phone services offered in New York.

Nancy Gonzalez saw a listing in the Carrollwood News for the free phone services at the library.

“When I saw something about hearing aides it grabbed my attention,” she said. “Up until now I’ve had to answer all of his calls.”

“It’s very good to know about this,” Victor Gonzalez said. “The thing is sometimes I can hear, but I can’t understand people, so I don’t know what they’re talking about.”

One of the issues Walters and the special phones help with is the difficulties the hearing-impaired have in discerning speech, something that can require more than a volume boost. Walters fitted Gonzalez with a phone that will allow him to tune people’s voices to suit his needs.

“Forty percent of us lose the high pitch in our hearing as we age, so we have difficulty hearing women and children,” Walters told Gonzalez.
Walters began helping the hearing-impaired when she joined FTRI in 2002.

“I was looking for a career change at 45 years of age,” she said. “I came across a deaf person at age 13 and it had an impact on me.”
Walters later took sign-language classes.

“As an adult I didn’t know any deaf people,” she said. “I decided to volunteer. If you don’t use your sign-language skills you lose them, so I volunteered with the Deaf and Hearing Connection.”

Now Walters has no problem communicating with deaf clients. She can supply them with text-telephones, although most people she sees have at least partial hearing.

“Because it’s a nonprofit organization, we don’t have funding for advertising,” she said.

Instead, Walters gives presentations at nursing homes and libraries in an effort to get the word out.

“We have volunteers who put our phones together. We have a pool of volunteers who are basically students training to be interpreters.”

FTRI is a statewide nonprofit organization that administers the Specialized Telecommunications Equipment Distribution Program for citizens of Florida in need. FTRI is also responsible for the education and promotion of the Florida Relay Service.

The Florida Legislature passed the Telecommunications Access System Act in 1991, with the intent to provide basic telecommunications services for the Hard of Hearing, Deaf, Deaf/Blind and Speech Impaired. 

The devices and the program at-large are funded by a 15-cent surcharge on every Florida resident’s telephone bill. The equipment is made available to persons in need by contacting the Deaf and Hearing Connection’s main office in Seminole or by attending outreach programs like the one at Keel Library.
“I travel all of Hillsborough County,” Walters said. “Basically I’m on the road most of the time – seeing how the people react – that is what’s rewarding. It’s all about education. That’s why we named it the Deaf and Hearing Connection – to educate the hearing population as well as the deaf.”

“I’ve never gotten tired of this because I know I’m helping people and that’s so rewarding.”

For information or to schedule an appointment, call (888) 832-4314. Applications and an outreach calendar are available on the FTRI Web site, located at http://www.ftri.org.

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