My hearing advocacy colleague Shari Eberts and I were excited as always to attend a conference of hearing care professionals (HCPs), where we were scheduled to present the patient’s perspective.
We were dismayed, at the first presentation of the conference, to find that the captioning access we depend on was not available. While we had not expected that the room would be hearing-looped, which is the norm in consumer hearing loss meetings and conferences, captioning access is integral to the success of people with hearing loss. This seemed to us a shocking oversight. Without text interpretation, we were at a disadvantage to other audience members.
A speech-to-text app on our smartphones helped to bridge some of the gap. But in a large room where the phone was at a distance from the speaker, the captioning was far from perfect. On a couple of occasions, the speaker’s words were mis-captioned as sexual comments, which set us giggling and further adrift from the speaker’s message.
Lisa Anne Seerup, an audiologist and president of Hearing New Zealand recently posted on LinkedIn: I have never been to an audiology event that was accessible to people with hearing impairment. Non-existent captioning, no assistive devices, poor acoustics, and events that exceed safe noise levels that create neurological damage.
I have attended just one professional conference offering inclusive communication access, but most events do not. Why not?
Do organizers assume captions aren’t necessary because:
- All the attendees will all be ‘hearing’?
- The speakers will be using microphones?
- Any attendees with hearing loss will be using hearing aids?
Or is it that captioning access is not yet the norm and therefore off their radar?
As the pandemic waned, my cochlear implant audiologist used a captioning tablet during the appointment. At my hearing aid clinic, there was a similar tablet on the check in counter to help us understand the staff. But when the mask-wearing stopped, so did the tablets.
Hearing care conferences provide professional development to its members including new standards in patient care. So it stuns me that a crucial piece of communication access used and needed by most of their patients, is not yet customary – even though a growing number of HCP also have hearing loss!
Many years ago, I was amazed to meet, for the first time, an audiologist who had hearing loss. How could that be? How could she do her job? But she did it well and today I meet many HCP with hearing loss. When I present to university audiology programs, there are students with hearing loss choosing a career in the hearing health profession.
This reason alone should be sufficiently compelling to offer communication access in all professional hearing-related events. It’s easy to do and compared to the other forms of convention production razzmatazz, it’s cheap.
Captioning is on the rise everywhere – in restaurants, cinema, public spaces, and of course on television, computers, and our smartphones. So please, introduce captioning access into all areas of your profession. We, the people with hearing loss, would appreciate it.
