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107 Chapter 5 Textualizing the “On Call” and “Off Call” Interpreter Before 1990, access in the public sphere for people with disabilities was a luxury that depended on the kindness of others. The passage of the ADA made access for people with disabilities a right. Once the goal was established , states had to create a mechanism by which they could guarantee this goal, and create a protocol for measuring how well they achieved it. As a service that is provided by the federal government to promote the right of access outlined in the ADA, VRS is connected to a complex of practices that coordinate its delivery and reception. In this time of privatization, the government has subcontracted the provision of telephone access for deaf people to for-profit organizations, such as Ease Communication, and therefore must consider issues of employment, payment , management, efficiency, and profit. As individuals who engage VRS as service receivers or service providers, deaf people and sign language interpreters and the work they perform vis-à-vis VRS becomes a product of this coordination. This coordination is necessitated by and connected to definitions of disability, the ADA, and the FCC. This coordination, in the form of policies, occurs over great distances and is possible through the use of various texts that are taken up and acted upon by interpreters, schedulers, managers, and regulatory agencies. It extends to users of VRS as policies are conveyed to deaf and non-deaf callers through the direct and indirect behaviors of interpreters. Frequent users of VRS begin to incorporate these policies into their everyday use of the service. There are multiple aspects of VRS that could be measured, such as the amount of work, visible and invisible, done by deaf people who use the service, and whether deaf callers are satisfied with the service and, if not, which aspects of the service would they like to be improved upon. Deaf and non-deaf callers and interpreters could be surveyed about the 108 : chapter 5 effectiveness of a given call, which could also yield useful information. The texts used in VRS indicate and capture other important aspects of VRS: the amount of time it takes an interpreter to connect to both callers and the number of minutes per hour an interpreter is connected to both callers. In this chapter, I discuss these texts and their role in organizing interpreters’ work in VRS. I must begin where we will eventually end, with “functionally equivalent ,” the language that appears in Title IV of the ADA. Two questions are pertinent to the discussion that follows: (a) What is “functionally equivalent”? and (b) How is it determined? In the case of video relay service, “functionally equivalent” is measured by the FCC to gauge how much VRS resembles the telephone service of non-deaf people. What do those services look like? It is helpful here to provide a laundry list much like the one Peggy McIntosh (1988) provided in “White Privilege: The Invisible Knapsack.” Granted, this list will not be as extensive as McIntosh’s; my point is merely to provide the context for the discussion that follows rather than enumerate the many privileges I share with other non-deaf people who function in a society that favors the ability to hear. As a non-deaf person, I can pick up a phone and call whomever I would like, if I have their number. I am able to place calls at any hour of the day. In addition, I can feel confident that when I am traveling on the road, in the city, if my car were to break down, I could find a phone that I could use to place a call to a tow truck or friend to help me. In my home, I can, for an additional fee, call friends through three-way calling, or through call-waiting have a call interrupted by another person. And perhaps most functional in my use of the phone is my ability to place the receiver on my shoulder and walk around the house cleaning and cooking, if I were so inclined. I am also able to go out and sit on the front porch and talk to friends and family while watching my neighbor, who is sitting on her porch talking to friends and family. Finally, for most of my calls, I share a language with the person to whom I am speaking and do not have to rely on a third person to mediate my call; therefore...

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