Judy Tinnock is hearing-impaired and uses a CapTel telephone, but it will be decommissioned later this month.
Judy Tinnock will turn 90 in February, but it seems unlikely that her son will be able to call and wish her happy birthday. That’s because the CapTel telephone she needs to communicate is being decommissioned at the end of January. Captel phones relay conversations through a transcriber so that people with hearing difficulties can still receive calls. “It is essentially a standard phone with an LCD screen that prints spoken words to the screen,” says Tinnock’s son Craig. “It has been a lifeline for us.”