The purpose of the survey was to collect as many experiences with products
as possible and not to quantify those experiences. The consumer comments are
intended to be anecdotal. There was no intention to gather a representative
sample of people with disabilities as commenters.
As described above, recruitment of respondents was as broad as possible,
using both individual contacts and disability advocacy organizations.
(It would indeed be worthwhile to quantify several aspects of the consumer
behavior of people with disabilities, but that was beyond the scope of this
report. See Recommendations A1,
A2, and B1 for details.)
The total number of completed surveys submitted to us was 1121, of which 1017 were used for the Report. The incidence of specific disability categories were hearing (44%), vision (38%), mobility/manipulation (19%), speech (8%), and cognitive (4%). [The total is greater than 100% because of individuals reporting more than one disability.] 83% of survey respondents had a single disability; 18% had multiple disabilities. Of the 18% of individuals with multiple disabilities, 39% combined hearing and vision, 25% combined vision and mobility or manipulation, and 16% combined hearing and mobility or manipulation.
The survey offered respondents a list of
13 telecommunications-related products and asked how many of them they used.
Respondents averaged 5.6 products each.
In order of frequency of use, the products are:
Standard wireline
telephone
Answering machine
Cordless telephone
Modem
Email
Fax
Wireless telephone
(voice)
Pager
Voice
mail
TTY
Caller ID
Chat
Wireless
telephone (text)
We asked each consumer to pick one of the products he or she uses, to give us more detailed information. The top five products selected for further comment were, in order of selection by the respondents:
Cordless telephone
Modem
Specialized customer premises equipment
Wireless telephone
We asked respondents if they used any assistive technology along with the selected product. Section 255 of the Telecommunications Act requires equipment not otherwise accessible to be “compatible with existing peripheral devices or specialized customer premises equipment commonly used by individuals with disabilities to achieve access, if readily achievable.” In the absence of a recognized list of such devices, we offer the list below, drawn solely from the consumer responses to this question. See Appendix F for a listing of all (not just “commonly used”) assistive technology used for telecommunications.
TTY or TTY modem
Amplifier
Auxiliary ringer or light signaler
Hearing aid
Assistive listening device (loop or silhouette)
Screen reader computer program and speech synthesizer
Screen magnifier computer program
Braille display
Closed circuit TV or external screen magnifier
Augmentative (voice output) communication aid, standalone or computer-based
Home control system or environmental control unit
We asked respondents to indicate where they had purchased the telecommunications product they had selected for further comment. In order, the highest frequency responses were:
Consumer electronics chain 21%
Office supply chain 16%
Catalog sales 12%
Telephone specialty store 9%
Some respondents referred to assistive technology that they used in conjunction
with mainstream CPE, and many of these respondents indicated that they had received
the assistive technology through their state’s equipment distribution program.
Respondents were asked to rate the selected product by how well it met their
needs: very well, fairly well, or not at all well.
Over 65% rated the product either “very” (29%) or “fairly”
(37%) well.
We asked respondents to say why they rated the product the way they did.
This was their opportunity for detailed comments on that one product’s
accessibility and/or compatibility features.
Many of these comments have been included either in the Product Type
section below (when no model information was given) or in the specific data
page for that Model.
We asked respondents, whether or not they were satisfied with the product, if they told someone else about their experience with the product. The respondents told an average of 6.9 people when they were satisfied, and 5.2 people when they were dissatisfied. This differs from the rule of thumb of marketing lore, in which satisfied customers tell 4 others, while dissatisfied customers tell 9 others. This may result from the appreciation of the value of information about accessible or compatible products within their peer group. That is, people with disabilities may feel that it is hard to find accessible products, and thus share information about their successes more readily. An explanation of the dissatisfaction communication number is that these consumers have a low expectation of product accessibility. When a product is not satisfactory, it’s not news, and so is not shared.
21% of dissatisfied respondents complained to the company (7% of total respondents);
12% returned the product (4% of total respondents).
We asked respondents to indicate what products they don’t currently use because they think they are inaccessible. One point of this question was to gauge consumer interest in new products, without asking the willingness-to-pay questions usually added to determine the strength of their interest.
62% of respondents answered this question, indicating a high degree of pent-up demand. (Responses that indicated that affordability was the principal barrier were excluded.) Five products showed up in large enough numbers to be worth reporting (in order of frequency):
Wireless telephone 19%
Modem 13%
Voice mail and audiotext/IVR 9%
Cordless telephone 9%
Business telephone 7%
It is important to understand that for most consumers who gave us comments on modems, “modem” was largely a stand-in for email and web browsing. Their subsequent comments were about these applications, not the ease or difficulty of installing the modem.
A second point of this question was to see how respondents assessed product accessibility. Whether they were correct in assuming products were inaccessible to them is impossible to determine, since that would require knowledge of their unique functional abilities.
However, there were certainly instances of product types that some respondents thought inaccessible, which other respondents with the “same” disability were using successfully. This was most true of cordless or wireless telephones and people who are hard of hearing, and modems and people with visual impairments.
We randomly selected 110 comments from the results and analyzed them. Of these, 24 (22%) appeared to contain evidence of misunderstandings about the accessibility of products. The most common were: