Per­sons with dis­abil­i­ties will now ben­e­fit from sub­sidised mo­bile de­vices and video as­sis­tant ser­vice, an ini­tia­tive launched by the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go (TATT) on Tues­day.

Deputy Chair­man of TATT, Dr Kim Mal­lalieu said that TATT is part­ner­ing with the Caribbean Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Union, an in­ter-gov­ern­men­tal or­gan­i­sa­tion re­spon­si­ble for fos­ter­ing ICT en­abled Caribbean De­vel­op­ment, to in­tro­duce a ser­vice that al­lows ben­e­fi­cia­ries of sub­sidised mo­bile de­vices to use them more ef­fec­tive­ly.

She added this ser­vice is ti­tled the Caribbean Video As­sis­tance Ser­vice which will pro­vide se­cure on-de­mand video, voice and text call cen­tre ser­vices.

“The pi­lot phase project will run from Sep­tem­ber to De­cem­ber 2019 and the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the project will in­volve the pro­vi­sion of mo­bile hand­sets to 100 per cent of hear­ing im­paired and vi­su­al­ly im­paired pop­u­la­tion in Trinidad and To­ba­go who meet the cri­te­ria,” she said.

The ser­vice will be of­fered to per­sons 18 years and over.

The project will be fund­ed by the Uni­ver­sal Ser­vice fund gov­erned by the In­ter­na­tion­al Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion Union.

The deputy chair­man said the full roll­out is ex­pect­ed to com­mence in Jan­u­ary 2020 and con­tin­ue through to Sep­tem­ber 2021.