If you’re deaf or hard of hearing, there’s been nothing preventing you from getting an iPhone, but you might have been a little bit miffed that you had to pay for voice service that you’d never use. No longer, however, as AT&T has announced today their new Text Accessibility Plan for iPhone.
The TAP plan costs $40/month and lets you ditch the voice part of the plan, while adding unlimited SMS text messages and holding onto the iPhone’s full unlimited data plan. That works out pretty evenly, since both unlimited SMS and the iPhone’s data plan usually cost about $20 apiece. Just in case you want to lend your phone to someone else, you can still make phone calls at a cost of $0.40/minute. And you can still get Visual Voicemail, too (though I’m not sure how useful that will be to most hearing impaired users).
Not just anybody can sign up for the plan, however. You’ll need to fill out an eligibility form (PDF link), which requires you get a Certification of Disability from a qualifying certifying agent.
