Telecommunication services for people with disabilities

A surprisingly high proportion of the world's population suffer from some form of physical or mental disability, and for many of these people this disability has a major impact on their daily lives. For them the Quality of Service (QoS) measures traditionally used for telecoms services are of little value: their key question is 'has this service been designed in a way which allows me to use it at all?' This chapter is intended to provide a basic appreciation of the needs of this sizeable subset of the overall Telco market, and point to ways in which telecoms operators can assess how effectively they are serving it. The initial sections review the available data on the size and nature of the disability issue, and look at some of the Legislative and Regulatory provisions with which Telco s may need to comply. It then looks at the way in which people with some of the principal types of disability can be helped or hindered by the way in which Telco services are offered to them. A later section considers the implications of disability issues for Telco's internal processes. A huge range of studies have been carried out across the world in recent years into ways of helping people with disabilities make best use of telecoms systems, and the references cited can only provide an initial introduction to the associated literature.