New service to help the deaf with their telephone banking

BARCLAYS Bank will tomorrow launch a service to help deaf or hard-of-hearing customers do their banking more easily.

The new arrangement coincides with the annual International Day of Persons with Disabilities and is the latest move by a high street bank to help those with disabilities do everyday banking.

Customers must sign up to the service in a Barclays branch for security reasons.

But thereafter there will be a marker against their account alerting the bank that the customer may be using a lipspeaker to do their talking. A lipspeaker is someone who is trained to communicate what a deaf speaker is saying.

Once they have signed up to the service, hearing impaired customers can contact the bank by phone any day between 8am and 9pm. Barclays already helps those with sight problems by issuing them with high visibility and brightly coloured debit cards with a tactile notch so customers know which way to insert a card in a cash machine.

In common with other banks such as HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest, it also provides hard-of-hearing customers video access to British Sign Language interpreters via a mobile app.

Many banks offer ‘talking’ cash machines – cashpoints where you plug in earphones before being talked through transactions.

The machines can be found using the ATM locator on the website of network operator Link – though visually impaired people may need help to use it.

Dr Roger Wicks, of the charity Action on Hearing Loss, welcomes the bank’s move. He says: ‘People with deafness and hearing loss frequently do not enjoy equal or convenient access to banking services.’