"Hard of Hearing"

Hohtopics said:
When you said "no trouble understanding strangers", did you also mean "no trouble understanding strangers over the phone"?
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You are asking which she meant, how about both. When I meet a stranger I have never seen in person, I cannot make out much, if any, of what they say. I also could not when I had hearing aids. Telephones are much harder since you can't see the person to get the "inflection" as to what they are saying. For me, most of my lip reading involves body language and inflection. This was also true when I had minimal hearing or some hearing with a hearing aid.
 
Bebonang said:
If the HOH can not understand speech over the phone, then the HOH is consider as deaf. If the HOH can understand speech on the phone or have no trouble understanding strangers, then that would make HOH as Hard of Hearing. It has nothing to do with hearing loss. There is a different degrees of hearing losses like Mild, Moderate, Severe and Profound. :cool2:
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My friend can chat over the phone with her mom using Spanish but cant chat with anyone else on the phone using English nor Spanish. She considers herself deaf.
 
Hohtopics said:
When you said "no trouble understanding strangers", did you also mean "no trouble understanding strangers over the phone"?
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Yes, but also understand the strangers if not lipreading. That is a far fetch idea for HOH to try to listen whether they have hearing aids or CIs without lipreading at all.... :hmm:
 
Wirelessly posted

I use the term hard of hearing for myself, but I don't describe it in details unless I was asked about it.
 
did you also mean "no trouble understanding strangers over the phone"?
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Well it depends. If they have a "professional speaker" voice, I can usually understand them, but a lot of people have soft voices or accents or whatever.
 
Yes, otherwise I was going to say that although I currently do not use the phone, I have an easier time understanding others in person that is mostly with lipreading. Although I do occasionally understand others without lipreading, mostly just few words or common phrases.

Sometime there are also different factors involved. Sometime you come across another person whereas your and the other person's wavelength simply clicks. Or it could also be the personal compatability, the state you're in, the room or setting you're in, the subject matter being discussed, the familiarity of the people communicating, etc.
 
jillio said:
In that case, you are free to refer to yourself as hearing impaired. There are those, however, and they are definately in the majority, that do not perceive themselves as broken or in need of fixing. So be careful when using that term to define others.
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I agree. There is *nothing* impaired about me unless I've been drinking.:giggle: I identify as Deaf simply because people don't understand the concept of HoH being anything less that a slight challenge with hearing which is not my case.
 
"Having a hearing loss" covers the whole range.

A story about people with accents. Years ago, I was talking with a conservative Muslim woman in a professional capacity. I was having trouble understanding what she was saying. Since it was all women in the meeting, with nonverbals, I was able to get her to remove the veil that covered her mouth. Problem resolved.

Any people who have a hearing loss severe enough to preclude using the telephone have the full right to call themselves deaf.
 
Another round on the merry go round. I got a TTY phone way back in Jan/96. I was not bilaterally deaf-then. Used the VCO feature-which I still use till this day even having a Cochlear Implant. Right-I disconnect my Implant when using TTY.( I know not everyone does this-doesn't matter that is what I do)

It is unfortunate we don't appear to have a series of words to sharply delineate "hearing impaired vs deaf/Deaf."

Implanted A B Harmony activated Aug/07
 
I find it interesting that lots of people are saying the line falls at whether or not you can use the phone. The cookie-biter then becomes quite an anomaly. The way that voices are compressed for the telephone just so happens to fall into that bad frequency zone for most with cookie-bite loss patterns. It's one of the really tricky things to explain, the "if you can hear me now why can't I phone you?" thing, but phones are a mystery to me. I tried any number of amplified phones but all that happened was that everyone around me could hear what the person at the other end of the phone was saying yet still I heard nothing. Or more accurately I heard "fuff fuff fuff fuff fuff, warble warble fuff" and that all I got from amplified phones was much louder conversations which went "FUFF FUFF FUFF..."

But many cookie-biters can hear irritation sounds at a very low level, things like dripping taps (mercifully I am not among them!) barking dogs, etc. so the description "deaf" doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, as in "Dear council, I am emailing you because I can't use the phone complaint service because I am deaf, my complaint is that the neighbour's dog makes a lot of noise", does not compute!

I guess it depends on context, if the question is why can't you use the phone then the answer is "because I am deaf" as in that arena I am functionally deaf. If the question is why do you need an FM system the answer is "because I am HOH" (I sometimes use the letters because the abbreviation doesn't annoy me as much if I don't think about what it stands for, LOL.
 
why can't you use the phone then the answer is "because I am deaf" as in that arena I am functionally deaf.
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Exactly. A severe-profound cookie bite is functionally deaf, because communication is in that area.
 
MCB said:
"Having a hearing loss" covers the whole range.

A story about people with accents. Years ago, I was talking with a conservative Muslim woman in a professional capacity. I was having trouble understanding what she was saying. Since it was all women in the meeting, with nonverbals, I was able to get her to remove the veil that covered her mouth. Problem resolved.

Any people who have a hearing loss severe enough to preclude using the telephone have the full right to call themselves deaf.
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Yeah, a HUGE range!:lol:

But some people prefer not to equate deafness with loss.
 
Well - I will say this again, if you can get a CapTel telephone, ANYONE, hearing, HOH and total deaf, as long as they can speak, can use a CapTel phone. You speak into your side, and the other callers conversation is then captioned. The only requirements, are a telephone (landline) line, the ability to speak and the ability to read. If you have 2 phone lines, it is easier as the relay team will be on the 2nd line at the same time and you don't have to give out a special number to all of the people you expect to call you.
 
According to the Captel site, you can also use Captel on your computer, with ANY sort of phone. I'm interested in doing that for our beach house. We don't even have a landline there, much less two landlines. (Edited - I need to buy a cellphone anyway, so I guess captel will work with a cell phone plus a computer, if I'm figuring this out correctly.)

Have you ever tried the Captel via computer method? Were you happy with it?

Sounds like you are experienced with the Captel on the phone, right? Which phone do you use? I might buy one for our VA house.
 
Beach girl said:
According to the Captel site, you can also use Captel on your computer, with ANY sort of phone. I'm interested in doing that for our beach house. We don't even have a landline there, much less two landlines. (Edited - I need to buy a cellphone anyway, so I guess captel will work with a cell phone plus a computer, if I'm figuring this out correctly.)

Have you ever tried the Captel via computer method? Were you happy with it?

Sounds like you are experienced with the Captel on the phone, right? Which phone do you use? I might buy one for our VA house.
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I have used the CapTel desktop 2 line model for the last 5 years, both here in Florida and in Missouri. I have nopt tried the online version, but I do know they have it. Online I tend to use my P3 or Skype or ooVoo. I am very, very pleased with my CapTel. The relay operators are, for the most part, very good and spell very well. Most people I talk with are understanding when I let them know that there is a 2-4 second delay in the conversation. That can be hard with automated systems, as the relay operator is typing furiously and the automated systems just runs on and on. My current cell phone does not have any web service so I can't use the CapTel that way, but I am planning on getting a new cell phone.
 
Sounds good.

As I understood it from the site, your phone does not have to have web service to work with the online, on your computer, method. It's just the computer that has to be online. But maybe I'm not understanding correctly how it works.

Anyway, the headline said something like "Use with ANY phone."
 
VCO is not the same as Captel, or at least not the same as the version explained to me. In our relay version you cannot listen to the person's voice as well as getting captions, it's either or. If you have a certain amount of residual hearing it's very comforting to hear your mum's actual voice saying there there after something awful happens, not a cold translation over relay.

I hear that phone lines are much cheaper in the US too, though not sure how true that is, we were quoted £195 for a second phone line installation only, then £12 a month for rental, no calls included. All calls that would normally be free on my operator are not free if you use relay (not true of all operators but because of where we live the other operator cannot bring us broadband) so you pay twice over. Needing 2 lines would be crazy expensive.

You can only use VCO with certain phones too, I have a VCO textphone and I can't use VCO on relay. Relay operators vary from competent to irritatingly slow and always want to swap operators in the middle of a very short call. I gave up.

If I could use the identical service to Captel I'd try it again, but Relay didn't make me feel like I was talking to my family at all, it was like getting a report of what went on at a family gathering that I'd missed.
 
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