Andrea J. Saks played a significant role in gaining permission for the first translantic
TTY call in may 1975. On the day of the call, she held a press conference at the U.S.
Trade Center Building in London. She has spent most of her adult life in pursuit of
equity and compatibility in international telecommunications  -This photo Courtesy of
 James C. Marsters and Harry G. Lang - Harry G. Lang Collection at  SMECC - Glendale AZ

Courtesy of James C. Marsters and Harry G. Lang

Courtesy of James C. Marsters and Harry G. Lang

(Left) The first authorized transatlantic TTY call took place on May 13, 1975. On the American side, Boyce R. Williams, Director of the Office of Deafness and Communicative Disorders, Rehabilitation Services Administration of the Department of Health, Educa­tion and Welfare sat at the TTY. He was joined by (left to right) Karl Bakke, Acting Secretary, Department of Commerce; British Ambassador Sir Peter Ramsbotham; the Honorable Caspar Weinberger, Secretary, Department of HEW; and Charlotte A. Coffield, Program Specialist, Office of Deafness and Communicative Disorders. 

(Right) On the British side at the U.S. Trade Center Building in London, deaf Member of Parliament Jack Ashley typed his message to the Americans. Behind him were Michael King-Beer, a deaf pioneer with the British TTY network, and U.S. Ambassador Elliot L. Richardson. Photographs courtesy of P.I.C. PHOTOS LIMITED.

transatlantic-tty Ludington Daily News - Jun 12 1975

From the Harry G. Lang Collection at SMECC Photo  formerly belonged to Dr. Marsters

Photos  marked UK PHONETYPE 8  ... and  sure enough  they are the same  model as 
used in the transatlantic  test.    

From the Harry G. Lang Collection at SMECC Photo  formerly belonged to Dr. Marsters

Photos  marked UK PHONETYPE 8  ... and  sure enough  they are the same  model as 
used in the transatlantic  test.    

From the Harry G. Lang Collection at SMECC Photos  formerly belonged to Dr. Marsters

Photos  marked UK PHONETYPE 8... and  sure enough  they are the same model as 
used in the transatlantic  test.    

The logo on the teleprinter.

What is the meaning of  this?

ITU/J.M. Ferré

“Information deprivation and bad access is the problem, not the disability.”

Andrea Saks

Renowned advocate of ICT for people with disabilities

Winner of an ITU World Telecommunication and Information Society Award 2008, Andrea Saks is the daughter of deaf parents, whom, from an early age, she helped to interact with the hearing world. Her father, Andrew Saks, was a pioneer in developing telecommunication technology for people with hearing difficulties. Ms Saks thus has a strong personal background and interest in the field of information and communication technologies (ICT) for people with disabilities. At the Award ceremony in Cairo, she underlined her commitment to making ICT accessible to all, telling her story in her own words:

I started working with my parents as a two-year-old relay service. This is a service where the hearing person makes the call for the deaf person so they can communicate with the outside world. It must have been a horrific experience for my parents to rely on a two-year-old, but I thought I did a great job. I got better at it by the time I was three. But by the time I was fourteen, I probably was another nightmare, because teenagers are not all that cooperative.

My father and mother met through the oddest circumstance, and it depicts the problem of what deaf people went through, and in some cases, still go through… My father stopped to help this person change a flat tyre in the middle of the night — as you did in those days, without fear — and he was surprised that this man knew to face him and speak to him, so he could lip read. My father asked him “how do you know?” The man said “well, there’s this beautiful deaf girl living next door”. That was my mother. The gentleman didn’t tell my father his name. But my father had written down his licence plate number, and this helped him trace where my mother was.

Andrea Saks

Andrew and Jean Saks, the parents of Andrea, were both deaf, and, as a child, she helped them communicate with others

My father was not born deaf — but was robbed of his hearing through a mastoid infection. He was an oral speaker. He had the advantage of having parents who had the funds to educate him. So he didn’t know any sign language. My mother, who was also totally deaf, was the daughter of a dual national and was educated in Britain… She was an oral speaker too. This was unusual in those times; there were very few oral deaf people as not everyone had the funds to educate their deaf children to speak.

My father was an engineer. He really was angry that he couldn’t use the phone as it prevented him from participating in business life. By chance, he met a wonderful character by the name of Robert Weitbrecht, a deaf physicist, who used to do radio TTY ship-to-shore with a telex machine. And with his other friend, Dr James Marsters, who was also deaf, the three of them decided they could convert this technology into something they could use over the phone. They had very little money to do it; they had no support from industry, because it was a very specialized market and therefore it was not economically viable. But they did it — they invented a modem.

However, they had no printing device. They had to use old surplus teleprinters… So they created Teletypewriters for the Deaf Incorporated (TDI), now known as Telecommunications for the Deaf, Inc. They got the equipment up and running, and started talking over the phone — typing the words in the original real-time text (which, by the way, is now standardized by ITU). And they were able to reconvert old, surplus teleprinters which were donated to TDI.

The deaf community got their shirt sleeves rolled up and reconditioned those machines… and they shipped them across the country. And they did it all themselves. It’s remarkable. But looking back, I was a little annoyed — I’d lost my powerful place in life. They didn’t need me any more. But they had to communicate with the outside world, and relay services weren’t quite up and running yet. So I still had some involvement.

The phenomenon was so important that all my mother’s friends began to write to her, saying “we want this too”. So they (my parents) encouraged me to go to England, and with the British Post Office we started the first deaf telephone network that was international. And we did the first deaf transatlantic call (in 1975)… It was a resounding success… it showed interpersonal text communication was something that people needed and could do, and it’s one of the reasons that fax slowly exploded into another wonderful tool we used… Hearing people may not realize it, but the deaf gave you the right to access data across the voice telephone network.

Because there were differences in different countries… this made new barriers for deaf people. One of the problems was that the British wanted to use Telecom Gold, which was an early form of e-mail. So they destroyed the network that enabled American deaf and British deaf people to communicate, because they wanted to do something better. There was no standardization — none whatsoever… We were isolated again. Other countries also wanted to give deaf people communication, and began to make text phones… France went to Minitel; Italy and Germany had other techniques.

That’s when I got to ITU. They nearly threw me out because I didn’t have any credentials, but fortunately, the US State Department representative decided it might be an interesting idea, and they officially put me into a delegation. That was 1991, and I’ve been coming to ITU ever since. And what I tried to do at ITU was to put a human face on technology, to make engineers understand that the modem didn’t terminate the call, the human being did. I want people to understand that ITU was very receptive to me as an individual. The resistance came from ignorance, or the fact they felt that they were going to have to spend too much money. Or, the fact that they didn’t understand how easy or how difficult it might be to implement something. We did have a wonderful standard that was called V.18, which invisibly translated all the flavours of text phones… Also, e-mail came along, instant messaging came along, and deaf people began to use other kinds of communication. But nothing is quite like real-time text.

Lack of standardization was the problem that caused the fracturing of the deaf telephone network. Standardization is necessary. The most important thing we can do is promote good standards that include accessibility features; mainstream them, not make them special… The feeling I have is that now the engineers get it. They really understand. I walk into a room. They know I am there, we work together. I look at a document, we see how we can put in certain features to make it better. I’ve been working with IPTV, which is Internet protocol television. I’ve been working with NGN, the next-generation network, so that, within the requirements documents, people’s needs are expressed.

The next step is implementation. This is up to legislators and regulators, because industry does have to be encouraged; because it does sometimes cost extra money to do these things… Ten per cent of the world has a disability of some kind. Information deprivation and bad access is the problem, not the disability.

I really hope that all of you… encourage people to use universal design from the beginning; that we have people who design whatever it is — whether it’s a gateway… or a device, or a software package, or a television programme of some kind that is going to be emitted through a set-top box — and that we make standards. ITU has been leading the world in accessibility standards. I’m very much an ITU lady. They gave me a home; they basically support what I do, and now we want all of you to support ITU in standardization. We need to have a global standards body that encourages outside people to join, so that standards are accessible and are worldwide and enable disabled people to access ICT.