Blog
Welcome to the Hearing Loss LIVE! blog. With hearing loss, we lose access to communication. In this blog, we share the strategies and tools (technology) to improve communication outcomes when hearing loss is involved.
We promote self-advocacy and show you how to be proactive for your communication needs, whether you are Hard of Hearing, or the hearing partner. Communication takes two; we can’t do our part unless they do part. It’s important for all of us to learn about communication needs. We seek to create an atmosphere of acceptance and growth through hearing loss. Let’s add a touch of inspiration to the blog because hearing loss needs inspiration.
There are many Hard of Hearing community members who inspire us that we want to introduce you to. We will share posts about them too because they create art through their hearing loss. One person makes music accessible and several others share their captioning advocacy journey. We find so many wonderful people in the community who inspire us to accomplish new goals. Community is important and we often refer to ours as the ‘tribe’. Meet the tribe here.
Chelle: As a lipreading instructor, I see firsthand how much our classes empower students to lead more confident and connected lives. Because hearing devices have limits, and we are limited without them, new communication skills are required to be successful with hearing loss. With hearing loss, we seem to lose our voice along with our hearing. Lipreading classes give us our voice back because now we have strategies and workarounds. Not many people teach lipreading classes in the USA and there has been no formal education for this in years. There used to be lipreading training for returning military vets during the mid 20th century because...
When you depend on lipreading, advocacy isn’t optional, it’s how you ensure communication. If we don’t tell people, they’ll never know. You know how we need lighting to ‘hear’ better? We need to take our hearing family and friends out of the dark and shine the light on them by letting them know what works and what doesn’t. We need to share the challenges, like poor lighting. “I can’t hear you in the dark,” is a fun answer. (We can’t hear them when backlit, for that matter.) Maybe we need to confess they talk too fast to keep up and if we try to keep up, it burns our energy up faster. The same thing for people who mumble or keep their...
September is Deaf Awareness Month. Hearing loss has a spectrum from mild to profound. With a mild hearing loss, we miss a few sounds, or lack volume, or both. Being profound can mean no hearing at all, or, deaf in certain frequencies only. Capitol D denotes the Deaf community, those who use American Sign Language. Then, there’s everything between and feeling of being between the worlds. This is a good time to mention that people with hearing loss can experience deafness in noise. Even with our hearing devices, we can be rendered deaf in certain situations. This is the confusing part. We hear A LOT of noise, but we can’t understand through...
We practice our lipreading skills everyday with every conversation we have. As we know, the majority of lipreading skills are not the lip shapes. The strategies we use most are: Self advocacy so we can set our stage for better communication. It’s letting people know what we need for better communication to reduce our frustration and theirs. Anticipation is the next most used tool; knowing the topic and using situational cues. Lip shapes are only one of the tools and they are valuable too! However, to master the lip shapes we need to practice at least once a week. Taking time to focus on individual lip shapes strengthens the brain...
There is one hurdle with hearing loss I can’t quite clear is listening and eating at the same time. It’s also how I recognize hearing loss in others. A couple of years ago, I attended a potluck where the average age was 70. I was hungry and wanted to eat so I moved to the outskirts of the crowd. I can eat, or I can listen. I can’t do both so I ate and people-watched instead. Someone asked a guy near me a question while he was eating. He stopped chewing, put his better ear forward and asked, “What was that?” He focused, listened, answered and resumed eating. Watching that interaction, I knew without a doubt he had hearing loss. The better...
Prosody is a skill people can use when talking to people with hearing loss. The general population tends to assume that speaking louder is the solution. That does not help and often distorts the message instead. Clarity is what’s needed and a big secret to clarity is using prosody. Prosody Definition: It’s the melody, rhythm, and flow of speech. The elements of prosody are; pitch, stress, intonation, and pauses. It’s a natural part of language. Prosody is most often studied by actors and performers, public speakers and presenters. Anyone in theater understands these concepts and they work for us too. In lipreading lessons, we’ve...
July is National Disability Pride Month and we want people to know it is possible to have pride in hearing loss. Getting there is gritty, twisted and involves emotional episodes. It takes determination and courage to reach the pride phase. In 2008, I had a big drop in hearing that put me into the severe range, a no man’s land. I didn’t want to be between the Deaf and hearing. In fact, I was highly resentful because it changed my life plan. It was a difficult time so it blows my mind that I can have pride with hearing loss. Never would I have thought this was possible back then. That wasn’t the start of my hearing loss so you’d think I...
In our last post for Hearing Loss LIVE! For Members, we mentioned syllables for lipreading. “Lipreading the short vowels are difficult. All we see is the drop in the jaw. The short vowels help create syllables and syllables play into lipreading too.” Let’s talk about that this month. When people think about lipreading, they imagine it being all about lip shapes and watching someone’s mouth to figure out what words they’re saying. Partly true but we all know several other strategies come into play. Using the syllables isn’t a big strategy but it’s useful for lipreading in subtle ways. While we don’t have the time to count syllables while...
Do we earn accessibility, or do we have a right to it? When researching that question, we are told it’s a fundamental right. Everyone should have equitable access to spaces, communication, technology and opportunities, regardless of ability. How many of us actually feel that way though? As hard of hearing, we learn how to adapt in quiet ways, smiling and nodding because we don’t want to ask for a repeat let alone accommodations. We apologize, “I’m sorry. Can you repeat that?” Let’s face it, most of us are grateful for the bare minimum but inside, we’re screaming. There’s nothing worse than feeling alone in a crowd. If you feel this, you...
For years I disliked teaching lipreading lessons with vowels and practically dismissed them. For the most part, vowels are inside the mouth with tongue to, or near, the soft palate making them hard to see. I guided people to focus on the more visible lip shapes instead to build their confidence instead of focusing on the nearly invisible ones. Those of us with high frequency hearing loss hear the vowels, luckily. (The most common kind of hearing loss is high frequency.) When I discovered the Janet Jeffers Method of lipreading, I adopted it because it made sense after several years of teaching lipreading. These are the 3 main ideas she...
Do you want to learn more? Listen to, or watch, our companion podcasts. Visit our YouTube channel for video shorts and captioned video podcasts. Because we care about accessibility, you can find a transcript, and the audio version, to all our podcasts on BuzzSprout.
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