Now, I’m 11-years old. I’m no more hard of hearing. I’m deaf. I hear noises but they don’t carry any meaning anymore.
I will go through all my study times without understanding a word I’m hearing.
The audio and speech recognition test below illustrates where I was at. If someone said ‘corde’ (rope) I guessed ‘porte’ (door); for ‘savon’ (soap), I guessed ‘poisson’ (fish). However, thanks to the training with my speech therapist, I had 100% understanding when lip-reading.
Even if I could hear with hearing aids at 60dB loss, sounds did not carry any meaning
Lipreading - Why context is important
Lip reading works as long as there is a known context. Some consonants look the same when lip reading. Some vowels too. As a mean of illustration,
Elephant juice = I love you
Would you be able to distinguish between b, m and p? Source: Dr Mary Allen
To further experience lip-reading challenge, you can watch this video on Youtube: What It’s Like to Read Lips
You can now understand that the context is very important. You could mess up your relationships at work when talking about elephants.
The question now is, how does it work, with so many words in our vocabulary?
Being hard of hearing, or deaf, each word requires an effort to acquire. Each one of them. Even if they don’t carry a specific meaning.
When lip-reading, I need to be able to ‘catch’ the words and remove the ambiguity. To do that I ‘load’ the words related to the topic of the conversation, and I have all the other common words at hand. As a result, when I knew the subject of the conversation, I would pick 80% of the words, and the brain would guess the missing words. However, if I don’t know the topic of the conversation, only the common words are picked and the sentences do not carry any meaning at all.
When you’re talking to someone hard of Hearing, consider these 2 things:
Make sure the person is aware of the topic
Remove all the ornamental words that do not directly convey the information. Go to the point. You need to balance the diplomacy with the energy the person will spend to understand you.
Compensation tools
This is for the ‘internal’ capabilities used to compensate and communicate. But fortunately, there is more.
Technology evolved and offered many tools to communicate with the external world.
And it’s still improving, such as automatic closed captions on YouTube.
Drowning
I spent all my education years without assistance, lip-reading teachers and copying my classmates' notes. I used a lot my intuition to fill the gaps. Most of the times it worked, but sometimes it didn't. When that happened, I had to catch up in the evening.
Finally, in 2003, I got my Master in Product Design. I was now out of university, and needed to find a job. It was hard to get out of the protective, predictible university world: I couldn't phone, and I had to post or email my applications to companies. Few responded. Slowly, I began accepting my disability would dictate my limitations and I started closing myself to the outer world.
My partner saw this and refused I give up. She asked if nothing could be done.
I remembered that cochlear implants did exist, but the image I had was they were clunky pieces of technology, with high surgery risks, and I didn't know if it was suitable for me. It turned out the information I had was outdated. As I discovered when I consulted at the hospital, the implant had evolved in significant ways (to see what I'm talking about, see Cochlear's implants evolution poster).
