MeAC – Measuring Progress of eAccessibility in Europe

Legislation/regulations

The Telecommunications Act of May 2004 transposed the EU Universal Service and other Directives, with the universal service provisions being similar to those provided for in earlier legislation. Until recently, telecommunications legislation/regulation had no specific reference to people with disabilities and no impact on eAccessibility.

Section 45 is a relatively new paragraph in this law, added in February 2007. The first step in this Section is the determination of the overall demand for the setup of an exchange (relay) service for deaf and hard of hearing people. Currently this demand is being verified via a pilot project TESS (a text and video relay service), done by Deutsche Gesellschaft (Deaf and Hard of hearing community) and on a voluntary basis by Deutsche Telecom (a large national operator). Format and implementation of the service has not yet been defined.

Apart from this, it appears that the “universal service” paragraph in the law has no relevance for meeting the needs of people with disabilities.

Other initiatives

Three commercial relay services for deaf people are in operation in Germany. Usage fees can be reimbursed under a national social support scheme administered by the ‘integration service’ if utilisation happens in an occupational context.

The main landline operator provides special tariffs for needy customers, including people on low incomes and people who are blind, vision impaired or deaf with a degree of disability of 90% or higher.

One major mobile operator offers special tariffs for disabled customers. People with an 80% degree of disability or more can get a 50% price reduction provided they use a specific basic tariff offering.

To avoid SPAM-abuse of the e-mail address the ‘@’ sign was written as ‘a t’ and each dot ‘.’ as ‘d o t’.
Please change the recipient address of your message accordingly. We apologize for this inconvenience.