Today, for the first time, Arcep is publishing a scorecard on operators’ performance with respect to usage and quality of service indicators for telephone service accessibility for people who are deaf, hearing impaired, deaf-blind or aphasic, for the first quarter of 2019.
After six months of use, a service that is operational for users but still being fine tuned
Article 105 of the Digital Republic Act stipulates that operators must provide telephone services that are accessible to end users who are deaf, hearing impaired, deaf-blind or aphasic. These obligations came into effect on 8 October 2018.
In Q1 2019, Arcep was able to gather results for operators Bouygues Telecom, Euro-Information Telecom, Free, Free mobile, La Poste Mobile, Outremer Telecom, Orange, Orange Caraïbes, SFR and SRR, all of which provide a telephone service that can be accessed through French sign language (LSF) translators, cued speech transliterators, or automated or operator-assisted text relay.
During this period, around 2,000 users employed the telephone relay centres to make calls to telephone service subscribers, which represents more than 750 hours of conversations a month in total, all systems combined.
Customer satisfaction scores range from 3.1 to 4.2[1] which testifies to a good level of satisfaction amongst those who use French sign language translation. Progress still needs to be made in cued speech and text relay services.
Having thus ascertained that the service is still being fine tuned, Arcep wishes that the average time it takes relay centres to process calls will be reduced – something that, in addition to operators’ own efforts, may require the increased availability of trained French sign language translators.
[1] Users are invited to evaluate a sample of their calls by giving them a score of 1 (very unsatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied).