← Return to Hearing Loss: Come introduce yourself and connect with others

Discussion
Comment receiving replies
@julieo4

Thanks Tony. Keep us posted on what you learn. The challenging voice issue is something many people don't understand. It happens as a result of poor hearing over many years. It's often referred to as 'deaf speech'. That is not an insult to deaf people, but it's a reality. When you lose hearing, or never had good hearing from birth or early childhood, you are not aware of certain sounds. Speech therapy can help with children, but it takes a huge effort. When we lose hearing, it's generally in the high frequencies, generally the consonant sounds (all sounds other than vowels). Consonants basically define words. Vowels don't, but they give speech power. Here's the difference: _u_ _ _ e (Vowels) vs p_rpl_ (consonants) Here's another one: _o_o_ _y_ _e. (y can be a vowel.) That's a 4 syllable word. vroom vroom is a hint. Now if I give you the vowels you can probably figure it out. m_t_r c_cl_ Reality is, when you don't hear sounds like s, th, f, n, m, c, etc. you tend to omit them from speech and your speech gets distorted.There are lots more of those soft sounds, but you get the idea. Deaf speech also tends to be nasal, which makes it even harder to understand. And, for those of us with adult onset hearing loss it's a huge barrier. We have to circumvent that barrier as best we can if we associate with other people with hearing loss. A good CART provider can usually translate it pretty well. Crossing my fingers that Zoom will get the message about captioning. CART is wonderful, but it's expensive to provide.

Jump to this post


Replies to "Thanks Tony. Keep us posted on what you learn. The challenging voice issue is something many..."

We had a previous discussion about Zoom captions. I just watched the "Ask Me Anything with Eric Yuan" presentation. The focus was to give an update on the security features and Zoom home - which integrates Zoom into Amazon Alexa and Google Assistance products. There was a strong focus on Zoom with the education sector because many classes are virtual. I, and others, asked the question about when the auto captions will be available. The answer was that it will be released in chunks, starting with those in education. My guess is that if you have a paid Zoom account, you'll get it before the free accounts. I didn't get an answer on why release to the whole community instead of the education sector but that was not answered. My guess is that the captions require bandwidth and may cause headaches for those that do not use captions??? Today's meeting used the automatic captions and they were pretty good since several of the speakers had challenging voices, including the CEO.
Tony in Michigan