Minimal connection to Deaf and Hard of Hearing folks. My brother had hearing limitations as a kid and attended a Deaf school, and I used to be the camera salesman of choice for Philly’s deaf community many years ago. Also used to work with conference call and early VOIP systems for broadcast, where this came up from time to time.
TTY and other speech to text systems are common to required in a lot of cases. It’s entirely likely that Lufthansa has a setup of some sort, most places do. Though guess it wouldn’t neccisarily be a separate machine these days. The old ones were literally a phone with a big keyboard and screen attached.
But it’s two way. The caller/customer needs one and so does the person they’re calling, and idealy it functions like texting. Hence the phone company’s involvement with your coworker. To my memory you could rent from or dial into many phone companies to provide one or other end of the functionality.
Basically you had a TTY, and a phone operator did. And they read things off to the person on the other end, then type their responses in for you.
There’s software that does it now from what I understand. So you don’t need a separate service or machine, just on an app on your phone. Smart phones in general have been a massive boon to the hearing impaired.
It’s very much not a perfect set up. And at a minimum calling into a company’s phone system and getting hooked up to whatever text to speech thing they use often required a hearing person to get connected. Cause it is/was often a “press 7 if you are hearing impaired” situation. It’s also a really awkward way to conduct a phone call, as you’re effectively going through a translator. You have to wait for them to read things off, and type things in. Misunderstandings are easy.
I remember printing out lists of phone prompts/button presses for deaf customers so they’d be able to contact customer service for the products they bought. And even then, around 2004, most people seemed to have shifted off to texting and web chat for whatever they could.
From what I understand this is also part of the reason for those customer service chat systems that are so common these days. It’s more accessible, amid all the other things it ads.
