But why do it at all?

Having spent some time interacting with an online Deaf community and trying to rally initial support for Meeting Half Way, it seems that the project’s motives need to be clarified to avoid unnecessary suspicion.

Simply put, Meeting Half Way is a form of corporate social responsibility which allows me (the individual) to serve a good cause.

What we do?

Our company (TM4B) provides Business-to-Person SMS services which, for those who don’t know, lets organisations use SMS to communicate with the people who they serve (e.g. students, clients, patients etc.)

How this all started?

Several months back, we started thinking about how important SMS must be to Deaf people and, to do good with what was available to us, we decided to offer our services free (where possible) or at cost price (where not so possible) to companies & charities who wanted to use our service to work with Deaf people.

We contacted many Deaf charities, but did not get much of a response and that was that.

How we got here?

More recently, we started to think about things again having seen our services get used to offer Deaf people with equal access to emergency services and taxi booking facilities.

Looking into the topic a bit further, we came to realise that the mid-point between Deaf and hearing people was textual communications… whilst Deaf people might have issues hearing, both Deaf and hearing people both know how to read and write.

Whilst it was only natural for us to start thinking that SMS was the key to making voice based services equally accessible to Deaf people, our thoughts broadened up to realise that other technologies (like bluetooth, IM or captioning etc) could be more suitable in different circumstances.

So we decided to engage in a project through which we could partner with other companies providing textual communication technologies to advocate text-based communication, thereby reducing the unacceptable levels of inaccessibility which by most of today’s services suffer from.

So where did the social change on an individual level come from?

Up to this point, our company’s goal was agreed to at the managerial level, but as the Managing Director, I decided to take this further and utilise the long sought-after opportunity to do good.

Asking myself questions like “Would I employ a Deaf person?” & “How do I communicate with a Deaf person?”, I came to realise how little I knew and, with a bit of research, also came to find out that Deaf people face a lot of challenges created by ignorant people like me.

And so, I decided to expand the broadness of the campaign to include social change as well as organisational change as both seemed to cross over quite well. After all, organisations and societies are both made up of individuals.

Ta-daaaa!

So that’s where we are now. A project which aims to reduce the challenges faced by Deaf people by rectifying the ignorance of hearing people like me, encouraging us to be more accommodating, campaigning for equal accessibility to services in a realistic manner and, along the way, supporting organisations looking to achieve similar goals.

I hope this post has done well to clear out any potential suspicions that anyone might have.