Bridging the Gap Between the Hearing & Deaf Worlds
For most, if not all d/Deaf and hard of hearing people, social events can be an awkward one and a difficult one at the same time.
If everyone is talking and the environment is not right, then it’s very easy to feel secluded and left alone.
But what if you, as a hearing person, want to prevent that? How can you help to make a d/Deaf/hard of hearing person feel included, at least as much as possible?
A common that I get asked and I see on Google is whether a deaf or hard of hearing person can hear with their hearing aids on?
The short answer is the dreaded “it depends”.
The long answer is that it’s complicated.
Find out if a deaf person can hear with their hearing aids here
Some of the topics that have been discussed here on this site are around mental health, concentration fatigue and deaf anxiety.
These are also the posts that have been getting a lot of attention lately, especially the latter.
But you also need to look after yourself, and this is why in this podcast, I talk about the importance of being selfish just so you can look after yourself.
Because if you don’t look after yourself, you can’t look after other people.
I learnt a new phrase recently: ‘deaf anxiety’.
After reading and learning more about, I realised that whenever I get anxiety, it is mostly likely because of my lack of ability to hear. And the more I read about it, the more I realised that it resonates with me and it’s definitely a thing.
It also made me aware that it’s a topic that we should be talking about more often, and this is why I decided to open up about it.
In this episode, Annie Tulkin from Accessible College helps to smooth that transition for disabled students, and in this episode, we specifically focus on deaf students journey, the difficulty that could arise when they don’t have access to certain services that can help to smooth that process.
But that the transition is not always a smooth one and the consequences can be very difficult for any students let alone those who are d/Deaf or hard of hearing.
You might find it hard to believe that auto-captions are bad for SEO. But if you think about it’s low-quality content; something which YouTube and Google does not like. Yet, from my own experience and research, many people still resort to using auto-captions (which is often labelled as ‘craption’) for their YouTube videos. We take […]
It’s time we give sign language interpreters a break and give them the recognition and appreciation that they deserve.
Many people don’t realise that simultaneous interpreting (and by the way, that applies to oral language interpretation too), requires a high-level of focus, listening and concentration.
And most of us don’t see that.
So let’s give them credit for what they do and appreciate it, and I’d like to start by sharing my thoughts below.
In this episode, I answer the question on what is the easiest language to lipread?
This is yet another question that I’ve seen crop up on Google and Quora.
Even though the easy answer is whatever is your main spoken language, the other answer is the dreaded “it depends”.
Because it’s all well and good trying to get a linguistic to understand which language is the easiest and hardest to lip-read; but it’s all irrelevant because it never allows you to completely comprehend what the person is saying.
As technology gets more and more sophisticated, we have seen gadgets that has literally changed our lives, and in many cases for the better. With the rise of technology such as smart speakers, we are becoming more demanding with what our gadget.
Remember how the remote control was seen as an innovative gadget? Now, it’s just something plain and normal.
But has technology gotten too far when it comes to using artificial technology to interpret sign languages? Or should we encourage it like we already do with oral languages?
Learn more about interpreting sign language with technology here
