Do companies that sell phone sex have to comply with the Americans with Disabilites Act, and provide alternate means for the deaf community to partake of their services? Are there seperate telephone numbers that can be connected to by users of TDDs (telecommunications devices for the deaf)?
I don’t know that answer, but I must applaud your outstanding question.
I eagerly await an informed reply.
ADA wouldn’t apply to those outside the U.S., would it?
But I’d think they’d comply voluntarily if they thought there was a market.
I have a friend who used to work as the night relay for Sprint. The way it works is, the deaf person calls the relay operator who calls the phone sex line. The deaf person then types to the relay operator who talks for him to the person on the other end. Being the night shift, he said he got over half phone sex calls. With an amount like that, Im going to assume that they dont provide an alternate number, they merely use a relay.
-PSM
Are relay services provided free of charge by the major phone companies? If so, I would suppose that’s a legitimate loophole for them to use.
And yes, the question is null and void when it comes to phone sex providers that operate outside the US.
The ADA mandate falls on phone companies, not on third party service providers like purveyors of phone sex. If you want to use a TDD, the phone company doesn’t care (in fact, it isn’t allowed to care) whether you’re calling Aunt Tillie or a phone sex service.
I just had another thought on this issue. Phone sex lines charge per minute, and are also known to make extensive use of automated touch tone menus that have a side effect of running up call time. I would imagine that using the phone company’s relay service would increase the call time even more, because even a fast typist would need time to transcribe menu options. I’m sure some enterprising lawyer would be able to argue that the cost of this extra time is a form of discrimination.
However, in this day and age, many phone sex providers also have presence on the web with web-cam sites, and I could see their lawyers presenting this as the method that the company uses to meet the needs of its deaf customers.
(BTW, does anyone know why I can’t seem to edit my own posts?)
On this board, you can’t edit your own posts, cause the powers that be have declared it so. Small price to pay for a helluva place to hang out.
BTW, welcome to the SDMB! With questions like this, you’ll go far.
So the edit button’s just there to waste bandwidth? Oh well, it’s not like I’m paying for it. 
Got off my butt and did a little research on this, and it would seem that the law is pretty specific in that it refers to “Common Carriers”.
I wonder if “party line” type phone sex services, that connect people directly to other callers, fall under the legal definition of “Common Carrier”.
“Common Carrier” is legalese for “phone company”. Someone who buys a phone line from a phone company and then uses it to provide a specific service–be it sports scores, pizza delivery, or phone sex–is not a common carrier.
Ah, but if a phone sex service happens to offer a “party line” number where you’re not calling in to an employee of the service, but being connected in a conference call to other customers of the service, does that, in effect make the phone sex service a mini phone company?
How long before we get force feedback phones?
The Relay, BTW, for the US that nbr is 711 (national relay), when I asked, wouldn’t do 900 calls because they can’t forward the charges,
but I don’t know if this happens today.
Some Relay operators won’t do calls like that too.
What on earth would be the point? The Deaf person has to type with both of his hands & do you think they have a third hand for the action part? lol
Obviously someone’s never heard of a phenomenon called “one hand typing”, which I believe was developed soon after the avent of the first network chat room. 
And the thing about not being able to forward the charges of a 900 number seems to fly in the face of the spirit of the ADA, because that would be effectively be denying a whole category of service (900 numbers are used for much more than just phone sex) to people with a specific disability.
Not only that, there are many international phone sex lines now, where the only thing you’re charged for is international long distance charges to some obscure country who’s phone system has a contractual agreement with the phone sex provider. I’m quite sure that you can make both national and international long distance calls through the Relay service, and they certainly can handle the billing for that.
Yes, you can do calls anywhere in the world now with the 711 relay. I only said at the time I looked this, things were another way…
Yes, I looked into starting a XXX TTY line once myself…
But you must also remember that Deaf people type in ASL-to-english & if you aren’t familiar with it, you won’t know what they are saying…