At the town recreation center where my wife and I take exercise from time to time, one day we passed a man who was using American Sign Language (ASL). That in itself is not too unusual in Central Texas, as there is a long-established Texas School for the Deaf in Austin, and as a result we have a higher-than-average concentration of deaf and hearing-impaired people in the area.
What was unusual is that he was by himself, directing his gestures and facial expressions to his smartphone, propped on a chair next to him. It never occurred to me until that moment that the video-call feature is a huge step forward for deaf individuals who use ASL. As long as the person at the other end also knows ASL, there's no need for any intervening interpreters or translation functions: just look and talk, and this guy was enthusiastically doing just that.
This was the vision of some Cornell researchers back in 2009, when older and slower 2-G phone systems were barely able to handle still images, let alone the 10-frame-per-second or so data rates needed to convey ASL efficiently. Sheila Hemami, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, led a four-year effort to squeeze video of both hand gestures and facial expressions over the limited bandwidth then available. By 2009, they were testing 25 prototype units with deaf individuals in the Seattle area, and hoped that their pioneering efforts would take hold and spread. Of course, when wider bandwidths and videoconferencing came along, the problem almost solved itself.
Even back then, deaf people could send text messages, and in fact that is the only way they could use the telecommunications network for many decades. Because most people have normal hearing, the big priority for deaf people is to communicate with a hearing person who has no knowledge of ASL. With the advent of the telephone, the only way a deaf person could use it at first was to sign to a hearing person, and ask the hearing person to make the phone call. This works, but requires a resident hearing person to help you.
The next step came when a deaf physicist and amateur radio operator, a deaf orthodontist, and the grandson of the founder of Saks Fifth Avenue used some surplus teletype machines to demonstrate typewritten communications over ordinary phone lines. This was in 1964, and in the succeeding decades, so-called TTY communication became a kind of standard for deaf people. Service agencies sprang up who would read the TTY messages over the phone to hearing people so a deaf person could use their TTY to communicate with anyone who had a phone. This was a great step forward, but still required the deaf person to invest heavily in a specialized set of equipment and hire a service agency to do something that hearing people could achieve with only a telephone. Nevertheless, it became quite popular in the deaf community for all sorts of uses. In a discussion thread on Reddit, a former TTY agent, as they were called, expressed amazement at how many deaf persons were calling sex chat rooms when he worked for the agency. That would certainly pose an ethical dilemma for the agent, but common-carrier law back then would prevent the agency from turning down such business, I suppose.
When text messaging became feasible directly on one's mobile phone, deaf people seized on it eagerly, even back when one had to use a 10-key pad and multiple taps to encode messages. Things got a lot easier with the advent of touchscreen phones and the bandwidth improvements that came along with 3-G and 4-G systems. For communicating with hearing persons, there are now Video Relay Service (VRS) companies which employ ASL interpreters to relay messages from an ASL user to someone who doesn't understand ASL. And with the advent of AI systems that are fluent in video images and sound as well as text, it is only a matter of time before someone develops an AI app that will at least supplement the work of a human ASL interpreter, and possibly become good enough to be used without human assistance at all.
The use of videoconferencing for ASL was not the target application when smartphone developers set out to make video over phones possible. But deaf people were the unintended beneficiaries nevertheless, and unintended uses turn out to be some of the more interesting byways in the history of technology. Ronald Kline, a historian of technology at Cornell, has written extensively about how farmers adapted Model-T automobiles to do everything from plowing to grinding corn. While Henry Ford wasn't planning on this, he was probably pleased if it meant more Fords were sold.
This is one reason why engineering can never be an entirely theoretical arm-chair exercise. Engineers have to get their prototype products out in the field where people they don't know will use them in ways that their designers can't imagine. Sometimes these ways will cause harm, and that is why prototype testing with safety in mind is so important. But almost as often, people will find beneficial uses that the developers never thought of, and what begins as a minor side use can become the main use after a while.
The most prominent example of unintended uses I can think of came about with the development of the Internet itself. While certain far-seeing individuals anticipated access to huge amounts of data by consumers (Vannevar Bush's 1945 "Memex" paper comes to mind), it seems that almost nobody prior to 1980 or so anticipated the huge increase in commercial applications of highly interconnected computer networks. From early email, which was mainly a peculiar way of evading the long-distance telephone network used by a few physicists to exchange technical data at a distance, the Internet has now become a well-nigh-essential utility for billions of consumers, and sustains the economies of the world. While it has its significant drawbacks (the maleficent influences of social media and Internet-based hacking come to mind), overall the Internet and its spawn have proved to be beneficial to humanity in myriad ways that its early developers and users never anticipated.
So I'm glad that members of the deaf community can now make phone calls to their deaf friends with as much ease and facility as their hearing counterparts can—and all without bothering anybody at the next table in the restaurant.
Sources: The 2009 Cornell research is described at https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2009/12/researchers-create-cell-phones-sign-language. I also referred to the websites https://nagish.com/post/how-to-use-telephone-if-deaf, about the history of TTY at https://www.smecc.org/tty___tdd_history_and_resources.htm, and discussions about the various technologies at the Reddit site https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualConversation/comments/ci1pbr/i_just_saw_a_deaf_person_having_a_phone/.
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