The alternative you offer is an email address nobody monitors
If a customer cannot use a telephone, almost every organisation’s answer is a form, a mailbox, or a relay service that requires a third person in the conversation. None of those is the same service everyone else gets.
For public bodies this is a duty rather than a nicety, and it is routinely met on paper by publishing an inbox that is answered in three working days. The people using it know perfectly well that they have been given a worse channel, because they have.
Because the assistant is the same regardless of whether the conversation is spoken or typed, the fix is structural rather than an accommodation. A caller who types goes into the same queue, in real time, gets the same answers from the same knowledge, and is handed to the same person — who continues in text.
What equal access looks like when it is not a separate channel
Not a separate inbox
A typed conversation is a call. It waits the same time, reaches the same team and counts in the same service levels, because it is the same queue.
Answered now, not in three working days
The gap between a phone line and an accessibility mailbox is usually measured in days. Here it is measured in the same seconds as everyone else.
Nobody else in the conversation
Relay services work, and they also mean a stranger hears your medical appointment or your rent arrears. This is direct.
Start speaking, finish typing
Useful for hard-of-hearing callers who can speak but not always hear, and for anybody in a noisy or public place. The conversation carries across.
To a person, still in text
Escalation does not dump the caller back onto a telephone. The human takes over the same written conversation with the history in front of them.
It is a web page, and behaves like one
Keyboard navigable, works with assistive technology, no app to install and no proprietary client to be supported or abandoned.
Patience is the default setting
Stammers, speech that takes longer, callers who need thinking time. The assistant does not talk over people and does not time them out.
Written proof of what was agreed
A transcript of what was said, which is materially better than a phone call for anybody who needs to check what was promised.
This is not a substitute for a relay service, a BSL interpreter or a specialist advocacy route, and it should not be published as one. It is the ordinary channel, made usable by more people.
Who this is for, specifically
A deaf tenant reporting a repair
Call by text · same queueCurrently an email address and a wait. Now a real-time conversation that raises the same numbered ticket as a phone call would have.
A caller who can speak but not hear well
Modality switch · mid-conversationThey talk, and read the replies. This is a large group and almost nothing is built for it, because it does not fit either the phone or the form.
Someone who finds phone calls difficult
Chat · same assistantAnxiety, autism, a language they read better than they hear. No explanation required and no separate channel to find — the same link, opened into typing.
A noisy ward, a quiet office, a shared room
Either modality · any deviceCircumstantial rather than permanent, and far more common than the permanent case. The same door serves both without anyone declaring anything.
Does this satisfy our accessibility obligations?
We are not going to tell you it does — that is a judgement for you and your legal advisers about your own duties. What we will say is that a real-time channel answered in seconds and escalated to a person is a materially stronger position than an inbox answered in days.
Do we have to run it as a separate service?
No, and you should not. It is the same link, the same queue and the same team. The moment it becomes a separate service is the moment it becomes a worse one.
What about callers with no internet?
They use the phone number, which still works and is still answered. Nothing here removes an existing route.
One platform fee. Seats only when you want people. No minimum, no term.