Malta Independent

Doing a inaccessi

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The Foundation for IT Accessibil­ity (FITA) annually channels ICT project requests to relevant educationa­l entities or associatio­ns. Projects are added to this list whenever it identifies a gap between the abilities of persons with disability and what they wish to achieve. The PC telephony project proposal was first circulated back in 2013. Our primary target audience were University and MCAST students. In the days of dial-up Internet, modems with voice support capabiliti­es were popular, and one could easily and cheaply enable a person who could not use a standard phone set, but still had access to a computer, to communicat­e using the phone, via their PC. A modem or modem card would cost you anywhere from Lm7 to Lm35. With the introducti­on of ADSL, cable based Internet and other alternativ­es, this hardware became harder to find, and most software no longer supports it. If you ask for a modem at a computer shop, salespeopl­e immediatel­y point you to broadband Internet technology products since the old technology is not familiar to them. The majority of solutions that FITA came across, refer to PC-Telephone solutions, that use broadband connectivi­ty to establish connection­s. Among these are many valid solutions, most of which are available as smartphone APPs, but they still rely on the Internet and not more straight forward phone calls.

The ICT solution we sought through this project, enables users to make and receive standard phone calls by using their computer instead of a telephone hand set, which they may not be able to operate effectivel­y. After much searching, we eventually confirmed that one can still source this technology from local telecom product suppliers (not

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