The recent conversations about wearing headphones astounded me, for example. You guys don't pay close attention to shadows and light and reflections when you're walking around, and check behind you every once in a while? Huh.
All the time! I'm more likely to do it when I'm temporarily sensorially/cognitively impaired because I'm a goddamned millennial looking at my phone while I walk. I find when people don't do that very frustrating. (This might be related to my other pet peeve of people who are walking on the wrong side of the sidewalk, and only switch over after they noticing me switching to compensate, thus making me switch twice.) Too many people are over-sure of their situational awareness, and don't know how to compensate for a loss in one aspect of it. Not that I'm perfect.
To your actual question: I can imagine being confounded by that period after suddenly going deaf but before learning ASL and lipreading--what do you do then? Carry a whiteboard around? Use speech recognition on your phone? On the other end, are there any exercises or techniques to make sure my speech remains understandable? Or is that mostly not an issue with people who go deaf in adulthood?
As a hearing person who hasn't done too much research into this, I guess I just don't know what I don't know.
I have lots of communication solutions. I was talking more about things like alarm clocks and phone calls and the microwave beeping and the doorbell/knocking and drive-throughs and loudspeaker announcements and what else am I forgetting that people rely on the sound of without really realizing it?
Ben, that punctuation was just for you.
A friend of mine has an alarm clock that shakes his pillow.
I have one that shakes the whole mattress, and also makes the light flash on and off. But I mostly use my phone with a vibrating alarm, now.
Oh, hrm. How do you suppress the startle reaction from people sneaking up on you? You can't always be hyper-vigilant. (I'm probably jumpier than most.)
Anything that can be done about hearing car horns?
I don't, really. When I'm not paying attention, and then someone shows up in my immediate vicinity, I startle violently. But you can ask your family/friends to get your attention by light or stomping on the floor first.
And the vigilance turns subconscious after a while; I'm spending some mental energy on surroundings and vibrations almost all the time. If I'm really absorbed in something (or drunk) my situational awareness plummets, but the rest of the time I nearly always notice movement and vibration a lot more than hearing people seem to.
Yeah, all kinds of timer things. The ones I can put on my phone are better, but the entire universe of cooking timers would be a problem.
You wouldn't hear people honking at you while driving, but that's not obviously worse than the if you can hear them.
There are some specific things with both audible and visible cues that you'd have to get used to checking visually - in my life, tapping my badge on the badge-reader at work, or the subway pass on the turnstile.
In terms of navigating hearing spaces, somehow remaining aware of your own sounds is a tricky one. (Squeaking chairs, body sounds, etc.)
Depending where he lives tornado warnings (which are easy to set up as phone alerts).
I think that for a formerly hearing person who losses hearing, the biggest problem will be people you know, but don't know really well. People you are close to will know, but everybody else is going to think you're a (bigger) asshole for ignoring them.
oh, yeah. I still don't have a workaround for thermometers. I just guess, and do a lot of different trials.
Apartment buildings with intercoms/buzzers are pretty tricky. But they also don't really exist in Montana.
Traffic, not just honking, but I do a whole lot of relying on hearing cars coming. If I'd suddenly become deaf, I'd be at serious risk of walking in front of a car before I got better habits around checking visually. (Actually, maybe I'm better now than I think I am? There are a lot more bikes around than there were even a few years ago, and I have to look rather than listen for them.) I'm on city streets, but if I were him I'd be very careful in, I guess, parking lots? Anywhere he's in an unstructured interaction with cars.
I do respect this ", etc..", but where it goes I cannot follow.
11.1 is why I'm worried about all my neighbors and their Pruii.
- That's why I started wearing really bright, obvious hearing aids, with my hair pulled back.
The biggest problem definitely is other people, though. The ones you know well are actually a lot worse because it is nearly impossible for them to remember that you can't hear.
If you were deaf before ubiquitous smart phones, how much have they changed things? It seems like many of the technological issues either go away or are at least ameliorated with them.
The ones you know well are actually a lot worse....
Like usual, I guess.
14 to 9
12- how to get an interpreter, what CART is, voice-to-text programs, legal rights, and then all the things you guys are going to tell me about here.
CART is "Classification And Regression Tree". You install R, regardless of your hearing.
My wife supervised a guy who also lost his hearing very rapidly--I want to say over a weekend. He went for a cochlear implant, which helped him keep his life without lots of obvious adaptation--but I know that the in between was rough.
15- Everybody always says that but I don't really get it. You can use a smartphone to write notes; before they existed I made sure I had a pen and paper on me all the time. In fact I still do. What else, besides an alarm clock, are you thinking of?
Easy texting rather than phone calls is what I'd think of -- hearing people are now used to casual communication being in written form?
Texting as a substitute for phone calls.
Let me be the first to suggest that texting as a replacement for phone calls might make a difference.
I feel like asking somebody text me (or email or message) instead of calling me is a reasonable request to make even though I can hear perfectly fine.
I recall it being a joke for a while that the new sign for "Deaf" was taking out a blackberry and typing.
Off the top of my head: timers, vibrating warnings (as said above), automatic poor-quality speech transcription--maybe of marginal utility, but it could be integrated with the actual telephone app, text messaging could be part of a solution to the apartment buzzer problem along with a note to text you. But I guess that isn't smart phones per se. And on preview I see I've been rapidly pwned.
Yeah, that's true. Deaf people were already texting long before smartphones, with beepers and then dumbphones, but you can't call a regular phone from a text- the other person has to have some sort of SMS device, too. So it's easier to communicate with hearing people who have cell phones, definitely, but doesn't solve things like doctor appointments and calling the pharmacy and other Official Business things.
And the advent of live video chat was huge (but that wasn't smartphone-specific). Being able to use ASL with other people, either directly or via relay interpreter, is a game-changer.
You guys don't pay close attention to shadows and light and reflections when you're walking around, and check behind you every once in a while?
I mean, I do. I also periodically walk with my eyes closed, trying to preserve my childhood dream of becoming a ninja. The one time I temporarily lost hearing in one ear and the other when I was blind in one eye and nearly blind in the other I was very disoriented, as if all my ninja training was pointless.
The US is the only country that has federally-funded* video relay. Canada I think is starting one, or somebody is trying to start it. But everywhere else, deaf people are still using hearing people or TTYs to make phone calls. Nobody tell the president, please.
*tax on everyone's phone bill
Note to self: be very alert at any meetups involving Eggplant.
You'll not know I'm there. I'm sort of a social ninja.
As near as I can tell, voice phone calls are almost dead. To a first approximation, every time my phone rings, it's a telemarketer.
As long as people have parents, there will be voice calls.
I think what I'd need help with is knowing if there were compensatory things you did to make up for the lack of listening to music.
If somebody lost their hearing later in life, all they need is somebody to write the words "Sometimes when we touch..." on a piece of paper and show it to them. They'll hear Dan Hill all day.
Completely legal, unless they're a prisoner of war.
I barely ever have to make a voice call, but it is necessary sometimes. The numbers I call at all regularly are my doctor, other doctors, and the pharmacy. I need it occasionally for other things because there are still people (and businesses) in Montana who do not have email addresses and only a voice phone is listed.
That's true. Here it is very easy to deal with the pharmacy using the phone system and voice menus. I don't know how you'd do it otherwise without going there.
I've been contemplating the experience of going deaf over a weekend, vs. over 10 years like I did. I had a lot more time to get used to it and make incremental adjustments to my life, but I also had a lot longer of a time to be in denial and an emotional wreck.
I'm excited to meet him because late-deafened people are a lot less common than regular deaf people. He is probably a lot less enthusiastic about the situation. I hope I will be helpful and not oppressive.
This may already be addressed, but it might be worth asking him if he is or has considered seeing a counselor. He's being bombarded with a lot of heavy stuff to process all of the sudden, and other people in his life may or may not have urged him to talk to a therapist (specifically, a health psychologist, which should be available through his cancer center).
Yeah. That (in my experience) is offset by the prospect of adding yet another appointment to your week, if you have 500 doctor appointments and communicating with them is exhausting.
I don't know where he's at as far as any of the health stuff goes; I think "go to therapy" is a suggestion that needs to be made at the right time.
I'll absolutely talk about how much my experience with therapy helped me deal with it all.
One weird side affect of the TTY-to-texting transition is that my 60-something parents do lots of texting shortcuts like "where R U going 2?" which one otherwise associates with teenaged girls.
compensatory things you did to make up for the lack of listening to music.
This is a good one. And an emotionally difficult one.
42 I say GA or SKSK or QQ every once in a while, by accident. And occasionally on purpose to be funny.
Here's a dumb one, but I'm not quite sure how I'd figure it out. Anything where you out your name on a list, then your name is called when it's your turn. Coffee shops, restaurants, while you wait oil changes, anything where you take a number and they don't update their display?
Also, I bet it's surprisingly tiring to have to watch people to get information usually contained in tone of voice as well as content of what they are saying. I wonder whether he might appreciate comments or suggestions if you'd expect him to find the experience just really tiring in addition to the obvious (frustrating, sad).
Ugh airports are the worst. Even if you tell the gate agent "I'm deaf, can you please let me know when you want me to board?" they always forget and half the time the flight moves to some other gate and you get suspicious when it is close to boarding time, but empty (or notice the sign changed) and then have to go racing around to find the new gate.
Also flight attendants like to give deaf people Brailled versions of the emergency instructions (ITIMHMTHB)
But yeah, I do have strategies for all of those things. Thanks!
More on 9: I think that for a formerly hearing person who losses hearing, the biggest problem will be people you know, but don't know really well. People you are close to will know, but everybody else is going to think you're a (bigger) asshole for ignoring them.
This did happen a lot during college. Then I felt bad and tried to fix it; now I am pretty used to people assuming I'm an asshole who is ignoring them. If we ever get it straightened out, no hard feelings, and if we don't, I won't ever find out about it so it doesn't affect me.
17.2: Thanks, but I was referring to the punctuation choice.
What's QQ? (I know the others.)
question mark. In the olden olden days there were question marks on the keyboards (because they were for sending telegrams, I think)
I have one that shakes the whole mattress, and also makes the light flash on and off.
Not everyone has kids.
I would want to know what would be BSL signers who only have one functional hand are supposed to do. (BSL is two-handed even at the level of some letters.)
It is, but there are ways around it. People with a lot of different dexterity levels (missing fingers, arthritis, bilateral CP...) still sign (in any sign language)- sometimes it takes some getting used to, on the interlocutor's part, but it's a solvable problem.
BSL also involves a lot more mouthing of English words than ASL does.
Why didn't they just copy our sign language since we copied their oral one?
I was talking more about things like alarm clocks and phone calls and the microwave beeping and the doorbell/knocking and drive-throughs and loudspeaker announcements and what else am I forgetting that people rely on the sound of without really realizing it?
Of these, only the doorbell would be a material issue for me, I think, and I really have no idea what I'd do. I presume you can get doorbells that ring your phone, but otherwise I'm lost.
As for the rest, I rarely rely on an alarm clock to wake up (and could use the vibration if needed), I always have my phone in my pocket, I don't have a car, and I can't think of any loudspeaker announcements I commonly hear that wouldn't also have a visual cue. Maybe platform alterations when I'm not at one of my regular train stations?
Planes I can imagine being bad in extremis, but I generally just use the TV screens to find out my gate and then board absolute last, so that wouldn't change much for an ordinary flight.
Of course, my job would be massively affected, given that it mainly involves talking to people on the phone.
Back when we had a baby in the house, we developed the habit of watching TV with the sound off and reading the captions. I suppose that won't be hard for Smith to think of on his own, but you might mention it.
58: Can't you just sent sexually charged texts?
56: Because you spell everything wrong.
57- Actually I have been trying to find a doorbell that would send me a text forever. They don't seem to exist. I have a computery friend working on the project- he got one made, and it worked from his house, but when he mailed it to me I couldn't get it connected to my wifi. So that's still a work in progress.
There are doorbells that make lights flash on and off, or that make buzzers go. (That's what I have historically used). Now there are fancy systems that are integrated with your phone and some kind of newfangled techno-bulb, so you can make the lights turn different colors when different things happen.
59- an immediately visible indicator that you're in a deaf house is that there are two televisions on top of each other. The kids watch the bottom one (with the sound on if they're hearing) while the grownups watch the top one. Everybody sits together but nobody is bored.
56 it was too hard to see our hands clearly, across the ocean