Ireland, at last! A lifelong dream becoming real. But how well would I, with profound hearing loss, understand the rapid-fire and varying accents of the country?
Quite well, thank you – with my hearing aid, cochlear implant, Bluetooth, smartphone technology, superb speechreading and steely self-advocacy skills. And when all else fails, a Hearing Husband.
Speechreading is a way of life for me. I watch a person’s face, hands and body language to get what’s being said. Many people don’t understand why hearing aids help them hear but not always understand. Vowels, made with the voice box, give words their resonance and power. Consonants frame the vowels, giving words their meaning. But they are formed with air and tongue and lip movements, making their high frequency sounds easy to miss.
It helps to see what we can’t hear. Speechreading is helpful, even crucial, for the majority of people with hearing loss, even though fewer than 50% of speech movements are visible on the lips. We also have to use facial expressions, hand movements and residual hearing.
So, how easy is it to speechread people who speak our language, but with an accent and often a faster pace of speaking which requires faster speech processing by non-Irish people like me (and the Hearing Husband, but mostly me.)
A happy discovery: after the first couple of days, it was no more difficult to speechread Irish than Canadian, especially when we become familiar with the individual’s way of speaking.
But what if we can’t see the speaker’s lips? From the back seat of a cab, for example? The Hearing Husband and I learned interesting and useful stuff from our drivers, so I used my phone’s built-in Live Captions which gave me the gist of what was being said. The gist, not accuracy.
And now, my only accessibility peeve about Ireland. Captioning on tourist videos in castles, ruins, museums and other points of interest were usually non-existent. I gave my speech-to-text apps a good workout, but as seen on the screen grab, the results can be confusing and totally unrelated to what was happening in the video. Open captions on the screen allow us to enjoy the experience as much as hearing people.
Audio tours were downloadable to my phone, but the background noise from other tourists or the attraction itself made it difficult to hear. While I may have missed some interesting details that only a spoken narrative can provide, almost every attraction had excellent information plaques that told me what I needed to know. And sometimes we simply wanted to explore history in quietude, among some of the most stunning landscapes in the world.
Whenever possible, such as on a delightful personal tour around Inishmore (an Aran Island) and on the sobering but fascinating Cab Tour of the Belfast Troubles, I sat in the front of the vehicle so I could speechread the driver. Both guides were men, and the lower registers of the typical male voice have always been easier for me to understand.
My never-fail strategy is to let people know I have hearing loss (before the Hearing Husband can tell them for me). We must ask for what we need without shame and do the best that we can with what’s available. And what was available were the Irish people, the renowned excellent communicators who welcomed us at every point along the way.
Note: If you are Irish and are impacted by hearing loss, check out Chime, the Irish organization for Deaf and hard of hearing people. Tell them Gael sent ya.
