DISABILITIES

By Daniel J. Vance

A reader of this column in the Desert Advocate in Arizona introduced me to disability advocate Judith Tunell. Through Tunell's efforts and those of others, Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport recently inaugurated the world's first simultaneous audio/video paging system to improve the airport “experience” for people with disabilities. Other U.S. airports should follow Phoenix's lead.

In a telephone interview, Tunell explained, “The (old) airport paging system wasn't user friendly for the Deaf or hard of hearing, the blind, or even the general public.”

Last year, Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport handled about 45 million passengers. Of those, perhaps six million were Deaf, hard of hearing, had a visual impairment or were legally blind. Arizona, a retirement haven, has an above average proportion of people with these disabilities.

“The Deaf and hard of hearing couldn't hear the pages before,” Tunell said of the former system. “When airlines changed gates, people didn't hear it and often would miss flights or get on the wrong plane.” She said the former system also failed miserably when people glued to wireless telephones or to headsets while listening to music missed important airport pages.

Tunell said, “The solution was a new system that has real-time paging using sight and sound simultaneously, over speakers and on screens.” Phoenix Sky Harbor is the only airport in the world to employ this new technology.

The new system has other features: For legally blind people, it has touch-screen paging with extra-large text; the system allows people to make personal pages without an airport employee's help; and it automatically adjusts paging volume to a particular gate's ambient noise—meaning the volume of the page varies in intensity depending on crowd size.

The system has worked well, said Tunell, in part because the City of Phoenix “totally included people with disabilities on its technological teams. We had a voice. We had hands-on opportunities as it went along to improve the system's design.”

Tunell, 62, has a seat on the Mayor's Commission on Disability and currently co-chairs its Transportation Committee. She is legally blind and “extremely” hard of hearing, wearing two “really strong” hearing aids, she said.

“This (paging system) is wonderful for everyone, disabled or not,” she added. “Everybody uses it and everybody benefits. We didn't want it to be self-serving. Instead, we were trying to meet the needs of the whole public.”

For more, see www.danieljvance.com