Andrea's life
Ms. Andrea Saks is a known advocate for ICTs for persons with disabilities. She grew up in a family of two deaf parents. She had to assist them from early childhood as their interface to the hearing world: she was responsible for making doctors' appointments, arranging guests' visits and other appointments on their parent’s behalf by using the telephone which was inaccessible to her family without her back then. Her father, the late Andrew Saks along with the late Robert Weitbrecht, and the late James C. Marsters, who were all deaf themselves, were the first pioneers to create a telephone system that the deaf could use independently. They created a Modem called the "Phonetype", which was coupled to the normal telephone, and used surplus teletypewriters as the printing device. It was a deaf telephone system that spread throughout the world. This device was the precursor of textphone and today's real-time text messaging.
What led you to become a lifelong advocate for accessibility to ICTs for people with disabilities?
I am what is called a ‘CODA’, a child of deaf adults. In the 1960s, my parents started a telephone used by deaf people in the United States called the “textphone”, which kick-started the liberation of deaf people to be able to communicate in real-time over the telephone.
What brought you to the ITU to become an advocate for accessibility?
This was slowly introduced around the world, starting in England. My mother was educated in England, and her deaf friends wanted to have the same liberty that deaf people in the United States had begun to enjoy. We took everything over and set them up.
We had a compatible setup; two English-speaking countries could talk. So transatlantic communication was possible for deaf people – with the exception, of course, of cost.
But everybody wanted to do it their way. Other countries had their protocols so the text phones could not work back-to-back: we needed standardization. So, in 1991, Dick Brandt, Vice-Chair of Study Group 17 in the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (CCITT) (the precursor to ITU-T), and later the father of V.18, found me and brought me to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Then we started to work on the first accessible standard.
ITU INTERVIEWS: Andrea Saks, Chairperson, JCA-AHF
