Better Hearing Consumer

    This fall, I’m honoured to be featured in the Hearing Loss Association of America‘s magazine ‘Hearing Loss’.  HLAA has given me permission to share the article here. It’s a bit longer than my usual blogs, so feel free to stop reading if you get bored, or to read it in ‘bits’.  And it’s really not that long…   Keep

   By Kathi Mestayer   Last week, Apple unveiled their new iPhone 7  in their usual product development process.  First come the rumors, then the second wave of rumors, then the unveiling, then the buzzfest, until, finally, it arrives in the stores.  I went to a Verizon store last week, and they told me it would be this Saturday, September

  Sometimes I moan and groan about my hearing aids, but every once in a while I see them as they are: little technical gifts that take me from hearing almost nothing to being able to perceive the sounds of the world. Not perfectly, but well enough to be grateful.   A couple of years ago, I wrote “Ode to

If there’s one thing you don’t need when you have hearing loss, it’s another reminder that you have it. We get plenty of reminders throughout the day—every day—with sounds we can’t quite understand, people mumbling, and captioning that’s missing when we need it. So why on earth would I mark my body with an inky rendition of a cochlea to remind

Do you use captioning?  On TV, perhaps, or in the theater, or on internet videos?  Perhaps you enjoy CART (Communication Access RealtimeTranslation) at live events?   It’s not easy to explain the simple power of turning the captions “ON” for people who have difficulty hearing the spoken word. It’s the difference between dark and light, confusion and clarity, misinterpretation and understanding.

I woke up with a shock the other morning.  Actually, the shock didn’t happen right away, because I was thinking about my cool dream of being interviewed for a position as nanny for Justin Trudeau’s kids. (For those not up on Canadian politics, Justin is our Prime Minister.)   The jolt came when I realized that during this interview with

For those of us with hearing loss, reminders are everywhere of what we may be missing —the joy of music or speech, for example, if only we could hear well enough to make sense of them.  Yet sometimes, unexpectedly, we receive messages from unusual sources that tell us that our senses are intertwined, helping us to enjoy what we thought

Don’t you just love those headlines that promise you the world?  5 Simple Tricks You Can Do TODAY to Revive Your Love Life! 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Celery—But Should! 3 Neat Ways to Pick the 5 People You’ll Meet Up There! These are examples of a listicle—a combination of an article and a list which offers advice to

Don’t mess with a speechreader!  This is a person with hearing loss—sometimes also known as a HoH (hard of hearing)—who secretly scans faces and body language to help them communicate. A recent article on interpreting body language by Travis Bradberry in Linkedin.com, is a fascinating look at how we interpret visual cues. In “Great Tricks for Reading People’s Body Language”, Bradberry translates

Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah Someone’s in the kitchen I know (oh-oh-oh) Someone’s in the kitchen with Dine-AHH Making lots of noise, noise, noise! The World Health Organization (WHO) says that  “excessive noise seriously harms human health and interferes with people’s daily activities at school, at work, at home and during leisure time. It can disturb sleep, cause cardiovascular