Traditional textphones are not mainstream devices. They are expensive, limited and complicated to use. TalkByText is a Windows application that offers real-time text on the PC and can also be used to call landline and mobile textphones. It is an ideal solution for businesses and other organisations that want to be fully accessible to deaf and hard of hearing customers and staff. Using the same IP based technology as the other TalkByText Overview applications, TalkByText Mobile turns your mobile phone into a real-time text terminal.
Prior to TalkByText Mobile, we developed the RNID Mobile Textphone for Nokia 9210(i) Communicator. That product liberated many deaf and hard of hearing people who until then were unable to communicate as freely while on the move as hearing people had been able to do for many years. There were however some further requirements that needed to be addressed:
TalkByText Mobile Edition was designed to meet these requirements. Rather than building yet another platform for text communication, we converged the mobile solution with our other real-time text environments (see also TalkByText Business Edition and TalkByText Web Edition).
Unlike SMS, TalkByText provides real-time, character-by-character text, essential for proper conversation and for making calls via a text relay service. You can read more about real-time text versus other text based technologies by clicking here. For more information, see the Manual for TalkByText Mobile (Nokia 9500) (Acrobat 5 PDF format 259KB). This manual is written for the Nokia 9500 version, but the general principles of how to use the software apply to the other handsets as well.
To turn your mobile handset into a mobile textphone, just download and install the TalkByText program. At the moment, we are only supporting outgoing calls, because incoming calls will require access to the mobile network's user databases, which link a user to an IP address. As no network operators currently offer this access, incoming calls are not yet supported. Important: calls to emergency services are currently NOT supported via TalkByText Mobile Edition.
TalkByText Mobile Edition in principle runs on any mobile handset that supports J2ME and MIDP2. However, because there are often subtle and even less subtle differences between devices, we sometimes need to make adjustments to presentation and the like. The following devices have been tested successfully by RNID with TalkByText Mobile Edition:
In addition, other people have told us that they have tested TalkByText mobile on the following handsets (please note that RNID has not yet been able to test these handsets):
Note: not all these phones have built-in full keyboards. We do not recommend using predictive texting on a keypad as this causes confusion for the called party (which could be a Text Relay operator) as every prediction is sent to the other side. External Bluetooth or infrared keyboards with individual keys for each character are highly recommended in this case.
At the moment, none of the UK networks is offering a complete package. However, because the application only needs a standard interconnection, for now you can just download the application directly to your mobile handset by using your handset's browser to navigate to http://www.ictrnid.org.uk/mt.html.
For help with installing, see Installing TalkByText Mobile Edition. For further help and information, see TalkByText Mobile Edition FAQ.
