As a long-standing supporter of efforts to increase access to, and ease of use of, information and communications technology products and services by people with disabilities, TIA and its member companies are committed to ensuring that communications equipment and customer premises equipment are designed, developed and fabricated to be accessible to and usable by the disability community.

TIA is dedicated to working with its members, government and disability rights leaders to maintain an active voice in shaping new guidelines for information and communications technology products serving today's advanced communications needs. TIA was recently selected to participate on the United States Access Board Telecommunications and Electronic and Information Technology Advisory Committee (TEITAC) to assist in updating access standards for electronic and information technologies procured by the federal government and other users..

A New Civil Right: Telecommunications Equality for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Americans, by Karen Peltz Strauss, chronicles the history of the telecommunications revolution for deaf people throughout America, which lagged behind new technical developments decades after the advent of TTYs. Throughout the book, accreditation is given to TIA and its involvement in the standards-setting process and how the association's work has contributed to removing the barriers faced in the disability community.

In this highly original work, Strauss reveals how the paternalism of the hearing-oriented telecommunications industries slowed support for technology for deaf users. Throughout this comprehensive account, she emphasizes the grassroots efforts behind all the eventual successes. A New Civil Right recounts each advance in turn, such as the pursuit of special customer premises equipment (SCPE) from telephone companies; the Telecommunications Act of 1982 and the Telecommunications Accessibility Enhancement Act of 1988 and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, which required nationwide relay telephone services for deaf and hard of hearing users.

The book provides a behind-the-scenes look at how deaf and hard of hearing people in America secured laws requiring access to the telephone and television programming incrementally, over a period of nearly four decades. Written in narrative form by the author -- who took part in these various efforts -- the book chronicles the successful efforts to achieve closed captioning, relay services, hearing aid compatible telephones, and other forms of telecommunications access.

Strauss painstakingly details how all these advances occurred incrementally, first on local and state levels, and later through federal law. It took exhaustive campaigning to establish 711 for nationwide relay dialing, while universal access to television captioning required diligent legal and legislative work to pass the Decoder Circuitry Act in 1990. The same persistence resulted in the enactment of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which required all off-the-shelf communications equipment, including new wireless technology, to be readily accessible to deaf users.

Because the author played an active role in many of the events shaping this access, the book's reporting is both authoritative -- complete with extensive citations for policymakers -- and informative, interspersed with personal and other stories for laypeople who will enjoy reading this fascinating history of one of America's civil rights movements. A New Civil Right also provides an invaluable resource for lawyers, engineers, researchers, educators and others involved in communications, civil or disability rights or grass roots advocacy. The book is available for purchase at http://gupress.gallaudet.edu/bookpage/ANCRbookpage.html.

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