ACCAN lobbies for real-time-text service

Stuart Corner
Monday, 24 August 2009 01:06

IT Industry - Strategy

The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) has demonstrated real-time text (RTT) conversation over a VoIP telephone service to members of Parliament and is lobbying for its introduction in Australia to supplement the existing TTY service for the hearing and speech impaired, which does not operate over IP networks.

Although RTT was designed for people with disabilities, ACCAN says it is a natural extension of voice telephony. "For instance, RTT can be used in noisy environments, or when you want to communicate during a meeting when voice is not appropriate. It is also very useful for conveying information where exact spelling is important during a voice call."

ACCAN's demonstration of RTT was part of a technology expo organised by the Deafness Forum of Australia and supported by Australian Greens' Health & Disabilities spokesperson, senator Rachel Siewert; parliamentary secretary for disabilities and children's services, Bill Shorten MP and shadow parliamentary secretary for disabilities, carers and the voluntary sector, Mitch Fifield.

The lack of an RTT capability in the digital world has been an issue for years. Telstra told the Estens enquiry in 2003 that the absence of access to mobile communication for TTY users had been a problem since the closure of the analogue mobile network.

The Australian Communications Industry Forum (ACIF) - now Communications Alliance - established an any-to-any text connectivity options working group in March 2003 to address this issue. It consisted of consumer and disability advocates; carriers, including Telstra; the National Relay Service provider; and the Australian Communications Authority (ACA), now the ACMA.

In July 2008 ISOC announced that its disability projects coordinator Arnoud van Wijk, and other researchers had documented a technique for real-time text combining existing Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards to enable text streaming over Internet protocol networks.

"The technique uses Internet telephony protocols to ensure compatibility with voice, video, and other multimedia services on the Internet. It allows text to be sent and received on a character by character basis, with each character sent and displayed immediately once typed, giving text the same conversational character as voice communication," ISOC said.

Their 'Framework for Real-Time Text over IP Using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)', was published as an informational document in IETF's 'Request for Comment' series as RFC 5194.

ISOC also announced the launch of the 'Real-Time Text task force' (R3TF), an informal forum for engineers, motivated individuals, experts, companies and organisations and set up a web site for information about RTT www.realtimetext.org.