Better Hearing Consumer

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

For those who have hearing loss and/or chronic tinnitus, news of breakthrough cures or treatments are met with a heartbeat-jump of hope. Then, a snort of suspicion.  But then we think, but what if?  How wonderful if one day, preferably before I die, ‘they’ discover something we can swallow or smoke that will actually revive those cochlear hair cells or eliminate chronic

This month, at least two countries are celebrating historic independence as nations. It was a full-on revolution for the United States and a bloodless document-signing for Canadians, but for both countries, it was a years-long march to the desired freedoms. People with hearing loss also wage private wars with their disability—that can last a lifetime. Maybe a little more flag-waving would

When people with hearing loss gather together—like 1500 of them—you’d think it would be noisy.  Loud voices talking over each other, yelling what?! or pardon?! In some ways, however, we are a quieter crowd than an equivalent number of hearing people. If more than one person talks at a time, we don’t understand anybody, so we generally honor the one-speaker rule.