I want to tell you about a phone call I took at work. A woman had booked a boiler engineer. She had taken the day off. Waited from eight in the morning. The engineer arrived at half two in the afternoon. He knocked. She did not hear it. He called the number on his job sheet. Her phone rang. She did not hear that either. He waited sixty seconds and drove away. She called us — the relay service — to deal with the aftermath. Rebook the appointment. Explain what happened. Wait another three weeks for the next available slot. I took that call. And then I took almost the same call again an hour later. Different person. Different engineer. Same story. By the end of that shift I had heard it four times. This is not a rare problem This is not a rare problem I work as a relay call advisor. My job is to act as a bridge between deaf and hard of hearing people and the hearing world during phone calls. When a deaf person needs to call their GP, their landlord, their bank, their employer — they type what they want to say, I speak it, I type back the reply. I am the connection between two people who cannot otherwise communicate directly. It is a job that teaches you very quickly how many systems in everyday life assume you can hear. And the one that kept coming up — every single day, multiple times per shift — was the missed door visit. Delivery drivers. Boiler engineers. Broadband installers. NHS transport. They all arrive at a door following the same protocol. Knock. If no answer, call the number on file. Wait sixty seconds. Mark as missed. Leave. Every step of that protocol requires hearing. And for a significant portion of the population — around twelve million people in the UK have some degree of hearing loss — that protocol fails completely and silently and nobody is responsible and nothing changes. Why the obvious solutions do not work Why the obvious solutions do not work The first thing people suggest when you raise this problem is a smart doorbell. Ring. Nest. Arlo. Excellent products. But they require drilling, which most landlords will not allow. They require wifi, which is unreliable in older buildings. They cost £80 to £200 upfront plus a monthly subscription. And they only work at the one door they are installed on — not the communal buzzer at the bottom of a flat building, not the back gate, not the garage. The second suggestion is to just turn the phone volume up. This reflects a misunderstanding of what deafness actually is. For many deaf people there is no volume setting that makes a phone ring audible. The ring is simply not a notification mechanism that works for them. The third suggestion is that the driver should just text. And yes, they should. But drivers follow their job sheet. Call the number, wait, mark it missed, move on to the next job. Nobody trained them differently. Nobody gave them another option. The idea The idea I kept thinking about this problem. Not as a product opportunity. Just as a frustration. The gap between what would fix it and what actually existed felt absurd. What would fix it is simple. When someone arrives at a deaf person’s door they need a way to send a text notification that requires nothing from the resident in terms of installation, cost, or technical setup. It needs to work for any visitor regardless of whether they have downloaded an app or know anything about the person behind the door. The answer that kept coming back to me was a QR code. Every modern smartphone has a native QR reader built into the camera app. No download required. Point the camera, the phone recognises the code, offers to open the URL. The general public learned this during the pandemic from restaurant menus and check-in systems. It is now genuinely second nature. A small card near the door. Visitor scans it. A simple webpage opens. One large button. They tap it. The resident gets a text message in three seconds. That is the entire product. Building it Building it I built DeafPing in my spare time. I am not a developer by trade. I used modern tools that let non-technical founders build real products. The result is a web application where deaf and hard of hearing people sign up with their mobile number, receive a unique QR code, download or print it, and stick it near their door. Every user gets their own unique QR code that encodes a URL tied permanently to their account. When a visitor scans it they arrive at a clean high-contrast page showing the resident’s custom message — something like “I cannot always hear the door — please alert me.” One button. The visitor taps it. An SMS fires to the resident’s phone via the Vonage API. The door opens. The system handles flats too. The card goes next to the buzzer panel at the building entrance. Visitor arrives, gets no response from the buzzer, sees the card, scans it. Resident gets the text. Works without any modification to the building’s infrastructure. I made it free because it should be free. The people who need this most have already spent years navigating a world that was not built for them. Adding a subscription to a basic accessibility tool felt wrong. What happened when I launched it What happened when I launched it I posted about it on TikTok. A few short videos explaining the problem and what I had built. Within the first few days five people had signed up. Two comments on two different videos stood out. One person asked if it would work in their flat with a communal buzzer. Another asked if they could set it up for their mum. Both of those comments told me something important. The product was reaching the right people. And the people it was reaching were immediately thinking of someone else who needed it — a family member, a parent, a neighbour. That kind of word of mouth does not happen for products people are indifferent to. A question also came in on Facebook about how data is stored. Someone wanted to understand before they signed up. That question told me the community was taking it seriously enough to do due diligence. That is a different quality of interest than a passive scroll. The physical card The physical card One friction point I had anticipated was the gap between signing up and actually having a QR code on a door. A digital QR code on a phone screen is not the same as a weatherproof card fixed to a door frame. So DeafPing also offers a physical laminated card. For £6.99 including free UK delivery, a user receives a credit card sized weatherproof card with their unique QR code and SMS fallback already printed on it. Peel and stick. The card survives UK weather. It sits at eye level next to the door or buzzer. Any visitor who arrives and gets no response sees it immediately. The SMS fallback matters for visitors without smartphones or who prefer not to scan. The card also shows a short code to text to a dedicated number. Same outcome. Resident gets the alert. At £6.99 the margin after materials and postage is meaningful but the real purpose is activation. Someone with a laminated card on their actual door is a fundamentally different user from someone who signed up and never printed anything. The physical card removes the last barrier between the product working in theory and working in practice. What this is really about What this is really about I want to be honest about something. DeafPing is a small tool. It does one thing. It is not a platform. It is not trying to solve the entire accessibility problem facing deaf people in the UK. It will not change the protocols that delivery companies follow. It will not update the training that engineers receive. It will not fix the Priority Services Register or the patchy implementation of the Equality Act 2010 by housing associations and utility companies who have legal obligations they do not always meet. What it does is give one person a practical way to reduce the number of times those systemic failures directly affect their daily life. One QR code on one door means the boiler engineer who arrives on Tuesday does not have to leave without completing the job. It means the parcel that needed a signature does not go back to the depot. It means the NHS transport that arrives at 8am finds someone at the door when it expected to find nobody. That is not nothing. Twelve million people in the UK have some degree of hearing loss. Most of them have a door. Most of them have had an engineer or a driver or a delivery person fail to reach them because the system assumed they could hear. Most of them have dealt with the frustration of rescheduling, reordering, explaining, chasing. For most of them DeafPing costs nothing and takes sixty seconds to set up. If you work in housing, social care, or accessibility and want to talk about rolling it out for an organisation, there is a contact form at deafping.com/organisations. And if you are a delivery driver or an engineer reading this , if you ever see a small card near someone’s door with a QR code on it — scan it. It will take you three seconds. For the person on the other side of that door it means everything.
