happen to know a little bit about those 911 oprs and what they can/can't do. in smaller cities, they don't have a 911 ctr.. the police dispatchers take the calls... all of them. around this area, they dont have ANY training on tty at all, none. in another town close to me, an opr didn't recognize tty tones and didn't run the setup program that spag gives them to run 911 and she hung up on the person 2 or 3 times before they called back with relay and the person passed away before emergency personell got there becuz she wasn't trained and didn't know. they had a vco caller of a lesser emergency on a vco phone where she cldn't type except for that programmed hi vco pls ga and the opr didn't know what to do, they finally called back thru relay.
spag does not train them on tty at all! they see the machine, know it's for deaf people somehow, and know they can click "macros" on their 911 screens to make it send on the tty, but they dont know what ga means, what sk means, what q means, nothing! i explained this to someone who needed to knwo and not be ignorant and responsible for someone's death.
with sprint, when we're told 911, we connect the call thru a programmed thing that gets the direct nbr to the emergency line for the city/state their calling from nbr is, we announce it's a deaf person making an emergency call to 911 and this is their phne nbr in case it doesn't show on the screen. from there, the call is in their hands to handle between them and we drop into strict relay only mode. sro does not call 911.. we tell them to call 911 direct or to call on their ttys and that's it. we can't call for them .
if you're deaf, and you need 911, your best bet, if you can, is to have a hearing person call and while that's very annoying, it's also the quickest way to get help. and if that means relay, that means relay and we need to be there. since we take state and internet calls, the internet calls can tie us up which is sad.. if a 911 opr knows tty and how to use it, they can request to be directly tty to tty connected to the deaf person but they're the only outbound party that can make that request.
i hope that deaf people read this and make a big deal out of it cuz 911 is a big deal and they shud definantly be trained on tty.
