page_title: Americans with Disabilities Act
section_title: What Do Telecommunications Companies Have to Do?
hierarchical_section_title: Americans with Disabilities Act / Sections of the ADA / Title IV: Telecommunications / What Do Telecommunications Companies Have to Do?
caption_attribution_description: English: A Deaf, Hard-Of-Hearing or Speech-Impaired person at her workplace, communicating with a hearing person via a Video Interpreter (a Sign Language interpreter, shown on-screen), using a webcam and a videotelecommunications program on her computer. Note the additional videophone on the left side of her desk.
context_page_description: The Americans with Disabilities Act is a law that was passed by the United States Congress in 1990. President George H. W. Bush signed the ADA, making it an official United States law, on July 26, 1990. Later, President George W. Bush amended the ADA and signed those changes into law. The changes started on January 1, 2009.
  The ADA is a detailed civil rights law whose goal is to protect people with disabilities from discrimination. Before the ADA, people with disabilities did not have many legal protections. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. This law made it illegal to discriminate against people because of their race, religion, gender, national origin, and many other things. But people with disabilities were not included or protected under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The ADA gave the Civil Rights Act's protections - and some others - to people with disabilities.
context_section_description: Title IV says that all telecommunications companies in the United States have to make sure that people with disabilities have equal access to telecommunication.  This means that they have to provide telecommunication services that are just as good as what people without disabilities get.  For example, they have to:
  Create relay services.  A relay service is a way for a telephone operator to help a person with a speaking or hearing disability to call a regular phone.  To do this, the person with the disability uses a keyboard or some other special tool.
  Make their relay services available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
  Not charge people with disabilities any more than they charge people without disabilities.
  Relay services have changed a lot since 1990.  At first, the most common relay services were teletypewriter (TTY) and Telecommunications for the Deaf (TDD) devices.  These were like phones with typewriters attached.  Two people with TDDs could type back and forth to each other.  Or, if a person with a disability wanted to call a regular phone (like a pizza restaurant), they could type into the phone, an operator would read the message out loud to the pizza restaurant, listen to the restaurant's answer and type it back to the person with a disability.
  Title IV also led every state in the U.S. to create Telecommunications Relay Services (TRS), such as STS relay.  STS stands for Speech-to-Speech.  It was created for people who have speaking problems.  STS relay operators listen to what the person is saying and repeats it in a clear voice to make it easier for the other person to understand. Today, many calls that use TRS are made over the Internet by consumers who use broadband connections. Some are Video Relay Service (VRS) calls, while others are text calls.  Either way, communication assistants translate between the signed or typed words of a consumer and the spoken words of others.  In 2006, according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), VRS calls averaged two million minutes a month.
caption: A deaf person at work communicating with a hearing person by using a Video Relay Service.  She uses Sign Language, which the operator translates out loud for the hearing person.
exif: {}