Talking Telephone for the Deaf

From the collection of

Northern Ireland Screen's Digital Film Archive
Launched in 2000, Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive spans from 1897 to the present day and currently contains an ever-expanding catalogue of 13,000 items. It comprises material from a variety of depositors including feature films, sport, documentaries, animation, amateur footage, light entertainment, and a significant proportion of broadcast material from the UTV Archive.

Talking Telephone for the Deaf


The TDD was invented by a deaf physicist Robert Weitbrecht and a deaf orthodontist James C. Marsters in 1964. Before email or texting this was a breakthrough in communications for people with hearing impairments. Like these modern counterparts it had its own vocabulary of commonly used abbreviations for example SKSK now hanging up and XXXX for a typing error. See the first such device in Northern Ireland in action, learn how it works and how it has helped the people who use it.


Tags