COMCARE Urges Action

The COMCARE Alliance has joined national leaders of the deaf and hard of hearing communities in asking the FCC to upgrade the nation’s 911 network to allow improved access to those who are deaf, hard of hearing or speech disabled. Thirty organizations wrote the FCC that TTY-based communications is becoming “increasingly obsolete,” and that modern text and video communications capabilities should be adopted. COMCARE director David Aylward said in a statement, “Right now, an individual who witnesses an emergency event can take a picture of the incident on their cell phone and send it to anyone in the world–but they cannot send that image to 9-1-1 or other emergency agencies because these agencies do not have the ability to accept and process external data of any kind.” Download (pdf) the letter here.