Today, 16 April 2026, during two sessions of the European Emergency Number Associations conference in Riga, EENA 2026, EFHOH Board Member Alf Lindberg spoke to promote accessibility for Hard of Hearing people in emergencies.
In the first session on accessibility, Alf Lindberg highlighted the need for the EU Member States to accelerate the implementation of Real-Time Text (RTT) and Total Conversation for contacting the emergency number 112. While the European Accessibility Act requires these services to be operational by the end of June next year, progress on implementation remains very limited in practice.
In the second session, Alf Lindberg chaired presentations from Sweden and Croatia, currently the only EU countries where RTT is operational.
Sweden’s emergency service, SOS Alarm, introduced RTT at the beginning of March this year. However, public awareness of the service remains low. As an initial step, SOS Alarm plans to promote RTT through HRF, the Swedish Association of Hard of Hearing People.Up until now, about a hundred RTT-calls have been made to SOS Alarm, but none of them in real emergency situations.
The Croatian perspective was presented by HAK (Croatian Automobile Club), which operates an emergency service for its members and has recently introduced RTT on a separate emergency number. At this stage, however, no practical experience or usage data is yet available.
EFHOH was pleased to contribute to the discussions at the EENA Conference 2026, where accessibility in emergency communications was an important part of the agenda. The exchanges highlighted both emerging progress and ongoing gaps across Europe, reinforcing the need for continued cooperation between authorities, service providers, and organisations representing hard of hearing people to ensure that accessibility measures are effectively implemented and used in practice.
(Picture: Speakers at EENA on the use of RTT in emergencies, from left Goran Baotic, HAK Croatia; Jonas Reinfeltd, OMDA software; Alf Lindberg, EFHOH; Björn Skoglund, SOS Alarm.)
