Messaging a boon to deaf

When Cary Barbin's car broke down at 2 a.m. on a remote road in New Jersey, pulling out a cell phone and calling the auto club wasn't an option. Like his parents, grandparents, and millions of other Americans, he's deaf.

But Barbin wasn't helpless. He took out his BlackBerry wireless pager and typed an e-mail to a hearing friend, who called the tow truck.

Barbin, 35, researches technologies for the deaf at Gallaudet University, a Washington-based school for the deaf and hard of hearing, but he didn't have an e-mail pager just because he's a techie.

Cell phone-size messaging gadgets like the BlackBerry and the T-Mobile Sidekick have caught on quickly with the deaf since being introduced a few years ago, giving them freedom to move around and communicate like never before.

"I talk to my friends almost everyday with the pager. It is really great!" said Bryan Blaisdell, a deaf 15-year-old in Pascoag, R.I. He uses his Sidekick to message his parents for rides and can stay in touch with them when he's out — things that would have been hard or impossible a few years ago.

The pagers have become even more important to the deaf than cell phones are for the hearing, since the deaf can't use regular phones or pay phones.

"Before, you were set to a strict plan that was set in advance. There was no way to change the plan if somebody was running late," said Joe Karp, director of marketing at Wynd Communications, one of a couple of companies that specialize in selling wireless services to the deaf.

Wynd, which is based in San Luis Obispo, Calif., started out selling e-mail pagers to corporate travelers. But in 1997, the company got an e-mail from a deaf lawyer, who pointed out that the pagers were great for the deaf.

"We began to explore the opportunity, and found that there was a decent-size market — 28 million deaf or hard of hearing in the U.S.," Karp said.

In November, Wynd introduced a service that makes its pagers more useful in communicating with the hearing. Users can now send text messages to human operators, who call a hearing recipient on the phone and read the message. The recipient can then tell the operator to send a message back to the deaf person's pager.