Month: December 2016

During the holiday season, a great gift we can give family members and a useful resolution is to work toward understanding others more.

When many families gather, members with hearing loss often feel left out or misunderstood, because their families don’t understand them and family members don’t have strategies to adapt to their hearing loss. Often, the person with hearing loss undertakes the responsibility for communication, but it’s overwhelming and sometimes impossible to do.

Around 38 million Americans have hearing loss, an estimated 13 percent of the general population. For those 65 and older, one in three Americans say they have some hearing loss.

One of the greatest challenges for a person with hearing loss is when family, friends, co-workers
and others don’t understand how hearing loss affects them. You may have seen comic routines where someone yells at a person with deafness, as if that strategy would work. Making something louder doesn’t make it clearer.

When someone has reduced hearing, a portion of the ear isn’t functioning. Different parts of the ear may be affected and in some cases, fluid in the ear may further complicate hearing. If they can hear something, what they hear is often distorted.

Hearing also comes in ranges, and when part of the ear doesn’t function properly, a person with hearing loss may not hear some high or low sounds. The pronunciation of many consonants, such as the letters h, s, f, and more, are in common ranges of hearing loss. A person with hearing loss may hear them sometimes or not at all.

One way to understand hearing loss better is to use hearing loss simulators. Here are two:
Hearing Loss Simulator

Starkey hearing loss simulator

Many people with hearing loss also have tinnitus, which can sound like static, droning, crickets, birds, and other sounds. Tinnitus may occur every day, all day long, and people who have it may develop a way to ignore it most of the time.

Having the sounds of tinnitus coming from the ear at the same time as other sounds weakens a person’s ability to hear clearly.

Tinnitus can get so disruptive that a person can’t sleep or concentrate.

Try the simulator below to experience 11 ways tinnitus can sound.

Tinnitus Simulator

Understanding how hearing loss interferes with communication helps you to develop strategies to make your communication clearer for those who aren’t hearing you accurately, such as:

• speaking at a relaxed pace,
• pronouncing words precisely, and
• using different words with the same meaning when a word isn’t clear.

As the world comes together with technology, we see more evidence of people embracing sign language for the holidays. Share the love in sign!

Pope Francis signs Christmas wishes for people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing. In the video, Pope Francis “asks people to pray for him and offers God’s blessing for Christmas.”

Watch a hearing child, Claire Koch, sign a Christmas concert for her Deaf parents.

Learn more about Claire here.

Shaylee Mansfield signs “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” in American Sign Language, ASL.

Learn Christmas ASL vocabulary words to use this holiday season!
Part I
Part 2

Deaf Christmas Eve worship service at Woodhaven Baptist Church in Houston is Saturday, Dec. 24 at 6 p.m.

When psychologist Linda Twilling, Ph.D. asks many patients who are Deaf and come from hearing families about the holidays, she says they respond with a single sign: “Horrible.”

Twilling says that some patients who are Deaf complain about missing out on long family jokes and incomplete translations of important family speech.

“Other Deaf people tell me another story of hope and disappointment. These Deaf people decide to avoid the holiday dinner with their hearing families, because of past isolation. Instead, they join friends for dinner or stay home to watch a movie,” she says. But they are still disappointed and miss family.

Whether you are hearing and wanting to include family and friends who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing, or if you are Deaf or Hard of Hearing, here are some ways to make the holidays brighter with better communication access.

Strategies for an Inclusive Christmas

Plan ahead. The Limping Chicken’s editor, Charlie Swinbourne, provides “12 tips to ensure deaf people aren’t left out at Christmas.” His tips include making visual holiday communications, such as phone calls using Skype, and playing games that provide some time for heavy communication breaks that give family and friends a break from having to decipher what everyone says.

Learn some holiday sign language. The Huffington Post shares Holiday Signs with interpreter Lydia Callis.

Study some American Sign Language, or ASL: ASL Lesson 1 with Dr. Bill Vickers.

Here is a another popular beginning ASL lesson on You Tube.

You can follow lesson 1 with 100 basic ASL signs.

Share a holiday story in American Sign Language, like “The Night Before Christmas.”

Visit accessible events with your family members and friends who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing, such as the Houston McCoy Christmas display house that shows captions for the song lyrics, attend movies that have captions (use Captionfish to let you know), and attend accessible church services, such as those at Woodhaven Baptist Church in Houston—where ASL is the main language and voice interpreters are used for those don’t sign.

If possible, attend Deaf social events with family members or friends.

Twilling says that one family hired an interpreter for their son for holiday, causing him to say his holiday was “great.”

See Santa surprise a young girl by using British sign language with her.

If you are Deaf, you can have fun with sign and teach the family a Christmas carol in ASL, “All I Really Want for Christmas.”

One example Twilling gives about a patient who said they had a great holiday was to invite a friend who was also Deaf.

“With two Deaf people at the vacation home, it was obvious that group communication needed to include them. Although this woman commonly functions by speaking and speech reading within her family, they made the effort to communicate more visually, and include her and her friend in planning and conversations,” Twilling says.