WebCapTel for the Hearing Impaired

Sprint is offering a great new service called WebCapTel for the hearing impaired and it is completely free.  The hearing impaired person would initiate a call via Sprint’s Web interface by entering the telephone number of the person they would like to call.  The Sprint operator would call the number entered by the hearing impaired person to initiate the call with the other person.  The Sprint operator would provide captions on the Web interface of everyone the other person says so the hearing impaired person can have a telephone conversation.

We have found this especially useful with our virtual classroom that we use for our courses.  The operator can call-in to the class (with the optional dial-in telephone number) and caption everything that is being said within the classroom.  This has helped us move forward with our accessibility improvements.  Due to the fact that it would cost several hundred dollars an hour for a company to provide live captioning for our online live sessions, this has provided a great alternative.

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