The deaf are still 2<sup>nd</sup> class citizens

In the build-up toward the 2nd Gulf War at 2003, the deaf in Israel were at last issued beepers to alert them under the same circumstances that airstrike sirens are activated.

My beeper appears to work – I got several test messages. However, according to unconfirmed report from someone, there may be a delay of as long as 5 minutes from the hearies’ siren activation until messages are sent to the beepers. This report is still not confirmed, and I hope that we’ll not have the opportunity to put the beepers to live test.

The more serious problem is that three Israeli TV channels (channels 1, 2 and 10) broadcast news several hours each day, and they sometimes repeat themselves. Yet there are no universal captioning or Sign Language interpreting in the news – not even when they are repeated and therefore are not truly live broadcasts, which are still difficult to caption.

Author: Omer Zak

I am deaf since birth. I played with big computers which eat punched cards and spew out printouts since age 12. Ever since they became available, I work and play with desktop size computers which eat keyboard keypresses and spew out display pixels. Among other things, I developed software which helped the deaf in Israel use the telephone network, by means of home computers equipped with modems. Several years later, I developed Hebrew localizations for some cellular phones, which helped the deaf in Israel utilize the cellular phone networks. I am interested in entrepreneurship, Science Fiction and making the world more accessible to people with disabilities.