If an air carrier provides telephone reservations and information services to the public, they must make that service available to individuals who use a text telephone (TTY), whether through the air carrier’s own TTY, voice relay, or other available technology. Airlines must provide access to TTY users during the same hours as the telephone service is available to the general public.

The airline has to make sure that the response time for answering calls and the level of service provided to TTY users is substantially equivalent to the response time and level of service provided to non-TTY users. They cannot impose special charges on TTY users. They must list the TTY number anywhere they list their other phone number.

Air carriers must enable captioning at all times on all televisions and other audiovisual displays that are capable of displaying captions and that are located in any portion of the airport terminal that passengers can access. The captioning must be high contrast captioning, meaning that it is at least as easy to read as white letters on a black background.

At airports, passengers with a disability who identify themselves as persons needing hearing assistance must have prompt access to the same information as other passengers at each gate, ticketing area, and customer service desk. This include information about flight safety, ticketing, flight check in, flight delays or cancellations, schedule changes, boarding information, connections, gate assignments, checking baggage, volunteer solicitation on oversold flights (like offers for compensation for surrendering a reservation), individuals being paged by airlines, aircraft changes that affect the travel of persons with disabilities, and emergencies (like a fire or a bomb threat).

Air carriers must make sure that all new videos, DVDs and other audiovisual displays played on an aircraft for safety purposes, and all such new audio-visual displays played on aircraft for informational purposes that were created under their control, are high contrast captioned.

The captioning must be in the predominant language in which the air carrier communicates with the passengers on the flight. For example, a flight in Japan would have captions in Japanese, in America, the captions would be in English and so forth.

For passengers onboard an aircraft, air carriers must, when requested by a passenger with a disability, provide effective communication with passengers who are deaf or hard of hearing so that these passengers have timely access to information the carrier provides to other passengers, like weather, onboard services, flight delays, and connecting gates at the next airport.

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