Hearing Loss Law : Washington Hearing Loss Lawyer & Attorney : John Waldo Law Firm : Hard of Hearing, Disability, Hearing Impairment : Seattle, Bainbridge, Washington, Pacific Northwest

 Washington State Ferries, the nation's largest ferry system, will shortly install a system to display visually the content of announcements made at its terminals and onboard its vessels. The system will be tested on board the two large boats serving the Seattle-Bainbridge Island crossing, and at the Bainbridge and Seattle terminals, for a six-month test, and if successful, will then be installed system-wide.

The ferry system makes a considerable number of announcements over public-address systems on its boats and at its terminals. While some are routine and relatively unimportant, others can be quite specific and very important, dealing with matters like lost objects, cars with lights or alarms on, vessel delays, or changes in loading or unloading procedures. Those announcements have often been inaccessible to riders with hearing loss.

Aurally delivered information can be made available to individuals with hearing loss by converting that information to written form and displaying it visually. That involves a two-step process, either of which can be problematic. First, the information has to be "captured" and put into written form. Second, the information has to be displayed in a manner visible to people who need to know what is being said.

For the ferry system, the display part was easy -- there are ample places to put television monitors or other devices to show announcements. The difficult issue was the "capture" -- discovering how best to put the messages in written form.

The firm with which WSF is contracting, Four WInds Interactive from Denver, is going to address that problem with a drop-down menu that will allow the crew to make the message specific without needing to do much, if any, keyboard entry. The standard boarding, welcome and safety messages will all be prepared in advance in written form. For variable messages like "car alarm," the program will display a menu of auto makes and colors, and can indicate the deck of the ferry on which the car is located. Similarly, the "lost object" menu can specify whether the item is a wallet, cell phone, keys, or other object.

The test system should be installed on the Bainbridge boats and the Bainbridge and Seattle terminals by mid-December, according to WSF officials. The timing is particularly appropriate, because those boats are often crowded with holiday shoppers even at mid-day, and the more crowded and noisy the boats, the greater the need for the information broadcast over the public-address system to be made visually accessible to people with less than perfect hearing.

Installation of the visual paging system is being done to resolve a lawsuit that the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) brought against WSF in 2008. The suit was quickly resolved in the form of an agreed order signed by the court. WSF has been working promptly and diligently to implement the terms of that order, and deserves our commendation and thanks.

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The Washington State Ferries have issued a request for proposals for a visual paging system that will display in captioned form the announcements made on board WSF's vessels and at its terminals.

The request -- a legally required step for a state agency to make a significant purchase -- asks potential vendors to give specifications and quote prices for what it calls a "voice-to-text visual paging system modeled after the visual paging system at San Francisco International Airport."

Deadline for vendor responses is January 7 of 2010, and WSF expects to award a contract on February 1. (Read the full document here).

Numerous announcements are currently made by public-address systems on all of WSF's vessels and at its terminals, but those announcements are difficult for hard-of-hearing people to understand, and are totally inaccessible to deaf passengers. Both state and federal law require government entities such as the state ferry system to make communications effective to people with hearing loss.

According to the bid documents, the  system "must be capable of converting regular voice messages from a variety of assigned vessel crew and terminal personnel." Both routine and specialized announcements (such a information about cars with lights left on) will be displayed in text form on television-type monitors or on reader-board devices.

The purchased system will be installed first for a six-month trial run on the two large boats that service the Seattle-Bainbridge Island route, and at the Seattle and Bainbridge Island terminals. If the system proves reliable, it will then be expanded throughout the WSF system.

 WSF's actions are being taken to resolve a lawsuit filed against it by the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP), a Washington non-profit membership corporation which has the objective of making Washington's public places accessible to people with hearing loss.

WSF operates one of the world's largest ferry systems, serving more than 23 million passengers annually. With studies indicating that almost 8 percent of the adult population have a hearing loss serious enough to interfere with their ability to understand speech, this system should benefit almost two million riders a year. 

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At a recent Seattle meeting of interested organizations, Washington State Ferries explained how it intends to convert its public-address announcements made on its vessels and at its terminals into text form, then to display those announcements to make them accessible to patrons with hearing loss.

The basic system will be modeled after the system used at San Francisco Airport, where all gate information and passenger pages are displayed in text on some 80 screens visible throughout the airport. Here are the notes from that meeting, as compiled by WSF.

The San Francisco Airport has a central communications center, where all messages originate. That allows the messages to be dictated by a very few speakers, which enables the information to be transcribed into text using a software program, without any additional human input. Because the WSF messages will originate on the individual vessels, a centralized system may not work in this application. WSF is therefore thinking about how to standardize the messages in such a way that vessel crews only have to type in the specifics, like the license number of a car or the name of a person.

The feedback from representatives of organizations that serve people with hearing loss was overall quite favorable, although people with both hearing and vision impairments noted that the proposed system could still leave some access gaps.

After evaluating feeback from the user groups, WSF will formulate a Request For Proposals, and follow state purchasing requirements to obtain and install a captioning system on the Bainbridge vessels and at the Seattle and Bainbridge terminals for a six-month trial. If the system performs satisfactorily, it will then be installed system-wide.

There are too many unknowns to predict with any certainty when the systems will be installed. The target to install the test system is the latter half of 2010.

WSF is undertaking this effort to resolve a lawsuit brought against it by the Washington State Communication Access Project, which alleged that WSF was violating the Washington State Law Against Discrimination by failing to communicate effectively with hearing-impaired patrons. After the suit was filed, the Attorney General's office worked smoothly with Wash-CAP to come to an agreed order implementing the communications improvements.

Washington State Ferries is the nation's largest ferry system, carrying some 26 million passengers annually. Assuming the prevalence of hearing loss among WSF passengers is similar to that in the nation as a whole, as many as 4 million passengers will benefit from a system-wide implementation of the agreement.

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The Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) and the Washington State Ferries have amicably resolved their lawsuit with an agreement that the ferries will begin to caption their public-address announcements made on board and at their terminals. The agreement is embodied in an order that will be signed by a court, giving it the same effect as if the case had gone to trial, and this was the decision.

Wash-CAP's lawsuit stated that passengers with hearing losses can't understand those announcements. While some are routine and relatively trivial, others are specific and extremely important -- lost items, cars with lights on or horns blaring, and so forth. And while this may come as something of a surprise to those of you who don't often ride the boats, low-priced or free tickets to sporting events and concerts are frequently offered over the PA system, and the race is indeed to the swift.

Under the agreement, WSF will immediately begin a process of collecting information about available captioning systems. Working with user groups such as Wash-CAP, WSF will then issue specifications, ask for bids, purchase a system and install it on its two largest boats, and at its terminals in Seattle and on Bainbridge Island. Following a six-month test, WSF will then either buy and install similar systems for all its boats and terminals, or we'll go back to the drawing board and try something else. (I'll post the agreement next week after the court signs it).

Exact timing is hard to pin down, because the Coast Guard has to improve most vessel installations, and until WSF knows exactly what kind of systems it will use, it can't develop a deployment schedule. The agreed order does require WSF to proceed diligently, and report to Wash-CAP, so we can hold their feet to the fire.

WSF is the nation's largest fleet of passenger ferries, carrying over 26 million passengers per year. With latest statistics indicating that 7.8 percent of the adult population suffers significant hearing losses, this agreement may mean that some 2 million riders per year will be able to understand messages they would otherwise miss.

Now for a good word about lawsuits. We'd corresponded for months with WSF before filing the suit, and couldn't get any specific commitments. Filing a lawsuit ensures two things. First, it ensures that the problem will come to the attention of the people in a bureaucracy or a large corporation that have the power to say "yes" and fix the problem. Second, it creates a time frame in which they must work. So we were able to get this problem resolved in just a little more than six months.

A good word -- lots of them, in fact -- have to be said for the Washington Attorney General's office. Once that office got involved, we stopped arguing about whether WSF had to make its announcements understandable to folks with hearing loss, and started working cooperatively on how it was going to be done. 

Sometimes, lawsuits can make a bad situation worse. But other times, lawsuits can be the quickest and ultimately least expensive way to get a problem resolved. 

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The Washington Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) filed suit today in state court in Kitsap County, Washington, asking for an order requiring Washington State Ferries to display the text of messages given aboard the system's vessels and at its terminals.

Our complaint notes that WSF operates the nation's largest ferry system, carrying 26 million passengers annually, and that it routinely makes public-address announcements that convey a broad array of information to its patrons. Those announcements, though, are unavailable to deaf and Hard of Hearing passengers.

The local press picked up on the lawsuit. It was the lead story in the Kitsap Sun on Tuesday, July 8, (complete with snarky but anonymous reader comments) and was in the Bainbridge Island Review on Wednesay, July 9.

I had carried on correspondence with WSF for several months before filing the suit. While WSF officials initially appeared responsive, saying at least that they acknowledged that the present system is problematic, they were very vague about any remedies. When pressed, they said that their systems aren't designed to display information broadcast over the PA system, but that they would investigate ways to contact crew members and request help.

At best, then, WSF was offering the kind of dependency that the D.C. Circuit recently rejected in the landmark case involving paper money and blind users. (And did you catch the absolutely lovely Associated Press story about the attorney who brought that suit?) Even then, I was skeptical, because WSF explicitly states that its crew members will not assist mobility-impaired passengers -- the only "accommodation" WSF will make to such passengers is to allow an attendant to ride free.

Wash-CAP felt a need to move relatively quickly against WSF because the ferry system is currently undertaking an in-depth review of its operational and capital needs. Wash-CAP wants to make sure that both the system and the State Legislature take the needs of the hearing-loss community into account as they make plans for the future.   

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