Work and deafness with many phone calls.

[sb10000]

Hi, I’m new here but hoping to gain some thoughts from others and I’ll try to explain as best I can. I suffer from Ski slope deafness and miss most of the higher pitched sounds across the board. But fortunate that I can hear something, and have relied on lip reading for 40+ years now. I’ve also rightly/wrongly not been vocal about my deafness as I’ve always ‘managed’

So, been with a fantastic company for 25years+ working as a business analyst. And a lot of my role was facing stakeholders and having lots of meetings/discussions including using lots of slide material.

The biggest change happened for me (and us all in some way) when the pandemic started and I had to work from home, being in back to back phone calls through the day which caused me massive communication challenges along with being very draining in the sheer focus on trying to listen.

Mainly because I’d always relied very heavily on combining lip reading with the ability to be face to face with people to ‘listen’ as much as I could. Hence I’d always put myself in scenarios where I could be in the same place as the individuals so I could see them.

So once working home full time, I’d mishear the conversations, miss bits of detail etc and meetings became much harder, having to pause to ask again, or through my own personal embarrassment in having to be much more vocal about my hearing issue which I’ve never had to do before, also in some cases I’d ask afterwards what was said.
Ps. We do have Skype and webex technology but I find these so inconsistent in terms of being in sync but also a nightmare for calls with multiple people.

So, thankfully my workplace want to help understandably, the ideal would be everyone back to the office but the whole hybrid working is taking over so it’s likely I’ll not see everyone in the office as pre pandemic. To help, they’ve offered to source technology which applies text on screen for when people are speaking, so am going to give this a try.

Does anyone have any experiences to share or advice? My initial thoughts are of nervousness in trying to read text whilst potentially also looking at slide material on screen, but also if the text is not in sync with the person speaking? Example being watching live news on tv!

Work are great in trying to help, so I don’t want to put problems in front of solutions so I’ll try anything.

Thank you for reading.

 

[x1heavy]

If you are issued some software that converts voice to text like You tube captioning movies in a chosen language then I am interested in it. It might be possible to run it on a smartphone near people who are talking to you.

This would be the one breakthrough among the deaf to essentially remove that limitation.

Your workplace could issue you a terp. But those people are like 20 to 30 a hour and you will find that the expense of several terps working around you a little bit of a problem before too long.

Those are the two things I can think of keeping you at work anywhere. (Home or office etc) I was talking with another poster here about USB Amps for audio for computer games and music etc. You could apply that with a experiment to boosting whatever is coming into your live video to a much higher level than your computer's sound card.

Its really dangerous to feel that you are slipping while missing small bits. That might be the million dollar value bit against your company or worse.

In trucking we went to satellite comms. Combined with Internet and GPS and precise maps etc. Ultimately there was hardly any need to use telephone anymore. Except when a irate dispatcher wants to do some screaming in your ear. (As a deaf person? LOLZ) set the phone on the counter top and wait until it quits squeaking so much. =)

 

[Jane B.]

I am not sure which country you are located in. Your use of "whilst" makes me think you may not be in the USA. The two things that follow are aps that apply to the US so do be aware of that.

I am retired so both of these are things that I make use of for personal use. I use an older phone that uses the Android operating system so it is not a matter of the latest hardware to use these.

For phone calls I have used InnoCaption for years. They really are quite good at keeping up by having live stenographers available. If you prefer automated you can set it for that. There is more information available on their web site than it makes sense to try to include in this post. Please see https://innocaption.com/ and then feel free to also ask further questions here.

I also make use of Google's Live Transcribe which only works on Android phones. Someone has come up with a version for IOS but that one is not free like Googles is.

I will try to remember to add more later but a thunder storm is near and I want to get off the computer for now.

 

[x1heavy]

The word Whilst I think originates in the UK.

I read quite a lot of material from before the US Revolution and after in the 1700's so that word I associate with the UK in general but is also a older world not commonly used or taught today in America. You probably will still hear it in use in theather productions focusing on a couple of centuries back.

In addition some parts of the USA hangs on to certain words. Maryland would be one that uses it. Virginia another. (We say Oil, they say OLL...) Or water and in Jersey "Wadder" things like that.