Barrett, 36, was born deaf to parents who are also deaf. He is actually the fourth-generation deaf person in his family.

In the early 1970s, his parents were some of the pioneers of relay service. They helped coordinate a volunteer relay service for the deaf and hearing impaired at their local church in California.

"I can remember when my parents would have to write what they wanted to ask or say on a note, take it over to a neighbor's, ask them to make the call, and then wait for the answer back," Barrett says.

Now Barrett helps runs the relay service for the entire state of Ohio, which approved a new feature from Barrett's employer, Sprint. June 1, the company began offering its CapTel (captioned telephone) service throughout the state.

The service itself is free to the hearing impaired, and the phones cost about $175.

In Ohio, the state pays for the service as part of the overall relay/TTD service - Ohio pays it by crediting against Sprint's gross receipts tax for the number of minutes used. Ohio became the 21st state to use the new CapTel phones last month.

Here's how the new system works. The two parties talk normally, but a relay translator listens in from a third location and then types in words to the hearing impaired person, who reads them off a screen built into the phone.

Then that person can talk normally into the phone. This technology is for those who may be hard of hearing but can still talk normally and is being marketed especially to seniors.

"Right now, we're conducting an outreach program to get in touch with organizations whose members might benefit from this," says Barrett, Sprint's Columbus-based account manager for the Ohio program. "These are the same people who would benefit from closed captioning on TV, and those senior citizens who have lost hearing and maybe have stopped using the telephone."

This is in addition to the normal relay service, which can include a videophone that allows a deaf person to use sign language to a third-party translator, who reads that to the other side of the conversation, then signs back to the deaf person.

I conducted the interview for this column with Barrett using both systems.

The first two-thirds of our conversation were through a translator - I never heard his voice, and my words were translated into sign language over a videophone. He then would sign back to a translator, who read what he said over the phone.

The delay was negligible, and after the initial surprise of speaking with a woman, the conversation progressed smoothly.

Then we switched to the CapTel service, allowing me to hear Barrett's voice. He primarily communicates using sign language, but he was clear and again, the delay was less than a second between what I said and when he got it.

"Speaking is not my natural form of communication, but there are many other hearing-impaired people who can still use their own speech," Barrett says. "And that's why now we have these two kinds of communication."

Barrett says the explosion in voice and video using Internet-based technology has made him more independent, despite the training he got in getting along without hearing from his family.

"People feel a lot more comfortable calling me, and my productivity has shot through the roof," Barrett says. "And those days of writing notes and looking around for a hearing person are long gone."

By James Pilcher, The Enquirer