This isn't a reply to a specific post, but an observation. My daughter has normal hearing, does series of Zoom meetings all day every day. She commented recently that all the meetings simply exhaust her. Prior to Covid, she did in-person meetings most of every work day, so she's not spending more time meeting, but doing all of it ELECTRONICALLY. I thought that only those of us with various losses have a much harder time with electronic voices (phone, Zoom mics, even commentators on TV), so I was really surprised to learn that people with normal hearing find electronic transmission tiring: auditory exhaustion. I think electronic devices alter the sound enough to make discrimination more difficult for everyone...and especially the HOH. I certainly experience exhaustion during person-to-person meetings, but not nearly as quickly or as much as during a phone call or Zoom meeting. Of course, the phone call means that I cannot read lips, but when the speaker's webcam provides a decent image without strange hiccups Zoom calls do offer lip reading, plus the speaker is full screen, often much easier to "read" than during a meeting around a large table.

One thing that I've tried and found unsuccessful for the most part is speech-to-text apps and TV captions. I wind up missing more by trying to fill in gaps I didn't hear by checking my phone, which means I can't see what the speaker is saying at that moment, while I'm trying to catch up on one or two sentences earlier. I do use TV captions, but live programs fall far behind, often miss entire sentences. Programs recorded earlier sometimes have captions that are not only correct but appear at the same time the person is speaking so that you aren't seeing current speech and reading previous speech, which is very confusing.

With Covid, I haven't experienced a face-to-face meeting for months, but I had determined to just put away my Android phone and Live Transcribe: too much lost by trying to find what I've just missed...meaning lots more missed. Most of the meetings I've been involved in are quite technical, lots of jargon and acronyms, important to "get" all the words. Those meetings are far more difficult than meetings of volunteers where we're deciding what we should do, as not every word is terribly important and it's possible to "get" the gist of the discussion without hearing/understanding every single word. Participating in a meeting about, say, water supply means that missing just one mention of a specific cfs (cubic feet per second) will make it impossible to understand fully the import of what the speaker's trying to get across. For me, it seems that I can "get" more of the discussion by watching speakers than by watching delayed words on my phone. Am I especially dense?