Dr. John Dennehy is a deaf virologist professor at Queens College, City University of New York. You can learn more about John and his fascinating career trajectory in this The Mind Hears profile published in July of 2021.The article below was written by John for the Sparks of Change column in the journal eLife. In it, John reflects how the pandemic changed his access to academic spaces. You can read the original article in eLife here, or scroll below for the full version.
Equity, Diversity and Inclusion: When communication all changed
-John Dennehy
On Wednesday March 11, 2020, the governor of New York announced that all in-person classes were to be suspended at my university until the end of the semester. As the news spread, my colleagues speculated that the shutdown might last a few weeks or months. To me it felt more significant, not unlike the aftermath of 9/11 when we realized that the world had irrevocably changed. As a virologist, I had some idea about what was to come; as a deaf individual, I did not fully comprehend what this would entail for me.
Ever since the COVID-19 outbreak had reached New York City in late February, I had been checking the newspapers every morning to get the latest number of cases and plot them. With the case rate doubling every 2.5 days, and vaccine production 12–18 months away at best, I knew that it was impossibly optimistic to expect normality to return within a few months. The world was going to be sheltering in place for the foreseeable future, masking, meeting remotely and social distancing. My ability to communicate with others was already tenuous. I felt as if it was about to be severed.
Born profoundly hearing impaired, I was fitted with hearing aids as a child and raised in the ‘oral world’. For many like me, hearing isn’t the problem; the problem is to make sense of the sounds. Picture yourself in a foreign country where you have only a rudimentary understanding of the language. Conversations, television programmes, what a service employee is trying to tell you… everything is incomprehensible except for a few words. If it’s quiet and you concentrate, you can partially piece things together. That’s my baseline; in hearing tests, my word recognition score is around 60%. In ideal situations, I can usually puzzle out what someone is saying by relying heavily on lipreading, context and non-verbal cues. If it’s noisy or these cues are not available, I understand nothing.
Barely a few days after the governor’s announcement, all my teaching and work meetings were taking place online. This quickly represented a challenge, as electronic or amplified speech sounds heavily distorted when re-amplified by my cochlear implant and hearing aid. Even when speakers had their webcam turned on and I could lipread, it was nearly impossible for me to understand what they were saying.
Real-time captioning, which would help solve my problems, was rarely supported by communications platforms at the time. To my dismay, I discovered that it was missing from the learning management system that my college used for teaching. Thankfully, I found an adequate substitute in Google Meet and I was able to continue communicating with my students. I had less success with some colleagues, who insisted on using their preferred platforms even though they lacked live captioning.
Online conferences and symposia were another challenge. When I alerted organizers that their software was not providing captions, most gamely tried to accommodate my needs but struggled to navigate technology issues. We once sat in an awkward, embarrassed silence for 20 minutes as the host of a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee meeting attempted to find how to turn on captioning. I had been invited to talk about the challenges faced by deaf individuals; I think this real-time demonstration was possibly more effective than anything I could have planned to say. Not everybody was so cooperative, however. Some organizers did not respond to my requests or claimed that accommodations weren’t possible. One asked me to not “make life more complicated” for them — ironically, they were putting together a series of seminars about improving access to research for underrepresented minorities.
After a few of these incidents, I reached out to human resources for assistance. It took four months of persistent emailing before I was presented with a solution: I could schedule a live transcriptionist for meetings, as long as I provided notice 24 hours in advance. As it turned out, this ‘solution’ had several problems. Transcriptionists were slower and less accurate than automatic captioning, and only available during business hours. It was also a logistical challenge to get them into conferences, especially those with registration fees.
Fortunately, after a few months, most platforms started to incorporate live transcription into their software. With this, my whole world changed again. Meetings and conferences had always been difficult for me as I would struggle to locate the speaker, focus on their face, and figure out what they were saying before someone else chimed in. Online, it was easy to see everyone clearly and to follow the conversation with lipreading and captioning. With remote communication becoming mainstream, I can now participate in meetings and conferences to a greater extent than in the past.
These technological improvements don’t mean that I no longer rely on the kindness and cooperation of others. For example, I still reach out to conference organizers in advance to ensure that captioning will be provided, because it’s usually not turned on by default. Hearing loss is often an invisible disability, and hosts may not realise that attendees – including their colleagues – could have hearing difficulties. They may assume that people will request the accommodations they need, but many are embarrassed to ask or don’t want to ‘be a bother’. It’s better to provide these adjustments proactively and mindfully.
The pace of change can sometimes feel frustratingly slow, yet I often say that there has never been a better time to be deaf. The hearing aids I had as a child were primitive compared to the engineering marvels that carefully curate sounds for my ears today. When captioned media began its long, slow rollout in the 1990s, a new world opened for me, one where I could finally share my friends’ enthusiasm for the latest movies and dramas. Now the era of mainstreaming remote meetings has ushered in another sea change for me.
Thibault Duchemin (left) and Skinner Cheng (right) are the co-founders of Ava, a live automated captioning app.
Live automated captioning has become a growing presence in the lives of many of us who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. From captioning live presentations, to providing transcripts of online meetings, to on-the-go captioning with mobile devices, these AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools continue to improve in accuracy and speed. In the past few years, they have rapidly become a versatile addition to our toolkit of strategies for improved accessibility in academic and other settings.
Thibault Duchemin and Skinner Cheng are the co-founders of Ava, a live automated captioning app with various transcription features, including translation and text-to-speech. The assistive technology is designed to enhance communication in different scenarios such as professional, academic and social situations. As a CODA (child of deaf adult) and a deaf individual, respectively, Thibault and Skinner have close ties to the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. We caught up with both of them to learn more about the origins of Ava and their experiences in creating this professional captioning tool. Below, Thibault first shares how Ava got its start, and then Skinner answers our questions about his journey from Taiwan to working with Ava.
Thibault: Backstory & how Ava began…
I grew up the only hearing person in a Deaf family, i.e. a CODA (great movie). My sister wanted to be a lawyer, but with the cost of interpreters to help with closing statements, client meetings, etc. there would be financial issues and communication barriers. I understood the challenge, and wanted to help!
While I was at Berkeley, I started working on “smart gloves” to translate sign language, which stirred a lot of excitement and showed there was a clear need for a communication tool.
After creating a prototype, plus hundreds of hours and bike rides across the Bay Area to meet and talk/sign/write with our potential users, we got some hard-earned learnings during customer development. We kept the mission – to bridge communication gaps between hearing and Deaf worlds – but we pivoted the product.
The pivot was to move to a mobile application that transcribes group conversations using speech-recognition technologies. The goal was 24/7 autonomy that would allow Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing users to understand and participate in group situations, effortlessly. Together, we designed a product that was easy to access in social, academic and professional conversational situations.
In early days, Skinner would go to an isolated space to check his phone at events. Today, in small groups, he uses the app [Ava] to communicate with others, transcending the silence blockade. At lunch and during meetings, we all use Ava to connect with each other.
What was just my personal story now became a team story as we slowly dissolved the communication barriers between each other.
Every day, these simple moments justify the thousands of hours we work to develop and improve this tool. We have a 45-person team (and counting), currently located between San Francisco and Paris. Skinner is a brilliant developer, who is Deaf and an inspiration to us all.
Skinner interview:
1. Tell us about your background? For example, tell us about your hearing loss, your schooling, and/or your family/culture
I was born in Taiwan. I was not born Deaf, but lost my hearing when I was 2-3 years old. My mother told me it was caused by an injection of medicine that I received at a clinic, which contained material that harmed my hearing.
I never received a standard education for Deafness in Taiwan—it is more offered and accepted here in the USA. I was educated by my mother to read lips and also speak. I never learned Sign Language because my mother wanted me to learn how to communicate like hearing people. I attended Deaf school for half of 1st grade, but then my mother enrolled me in a hearing school, so there were no disability accommodations I could rely on.
During primary school, my mother taught me math and other subjects. I started working with tutors one-on-one in high school until I graduated. In college, there were no captions, so I taught myself for the most part.
I usually communicate with my family, friends and colleagues by speaking, but sometimes we communicate through writing, if it’s too complex or difficult to say something clearly. Writing on paper was later substituted with a smartphone, which we often use today.
2. What has been your professional trajectory?
In college and at the university in Taiwan, I studied Computer Science. After graduation, my work was all about coding. I never worked at a large corporate company. I spent several years with a startup, which was later acquired by a medium-sized company.
My job position was always Software Engineer. I took a Senior engineering position 2-3 years before I left Taiwan to move to San Francisco. I studied and received my second Computer Science degree at the University of San Francisco. After graduation, I began working with Ava as Co-Founder and CTO [chief technology officer], and currently spend most of the time working as an Engineer within the company.
3. How did you meet and how did you come together to create Ava?
Many people ask this question—and it’s a fun story, indeed. When I graduated from the University of San Francisco, I was looking for a job, which could sponsor me to stay in the US and in San Francisco, specifically. I saw a post on a bulletin board at the school, which was from Thibault Duchemin and Ava’s COO, Pieter Doevendans. I don’t remember the exact words, but it said they were offering some accommodations (with a machine, or an assistive tool), which would allow Deaf and hard-of-hearing people better means to communicate during job interviews. So, I contacted them. And that was the first time Thibault and I met—in some cafe in downtown San Francisco.
Thibault didn’t know at the time that I was TOTALLY DEAF and he probably overestimated my lip reading ability. So after Thibault spoke for almost 30 minutes, I had to interrupt, and tell him that method of communicating wasn’t working. Eventually, we used my laptop to type and communicate. At that point, I understood they didn’t have the tool built, but wanted to do some user testing.
The second time we met, I met with Thibault and Pieter in another cafe in Millbrae, where we still used the laptop to communicate. I remember onlookers in the cafe were curious and inquired what we were doing. Afterwards, Thibault asked me to come to the University of California, Berkeley, where he described what they wanted to do. He asked me if I could help develop the MVP (minimum viable product) for the Android smartphone—and I did. We moved to San Mateo, launched the startup named Transcense in Boost, which is a startup incubator. After we raised adequate funding, we moved to Oakland. We got an established designer to help us design the company icon, and there you go… Ava was born!
4. Tell us what Ava is; how does it work?
Ava is an assistive tool and technical solution that Deaf and hard-of-hearing people can use—on their smartphones and personal computers—which transcribes what hearing people speak, in one-on-one or group situations. In brief, it’s a communication bridge between Deaf and hard-of-hearing people and hearing people.
5. Does Ava work with multiple spoken languages? How did you choose what languages to invest in?
Yes, Ava does work with multiple spoken languages. However, Ava cannot automatically detect the exact spoken language and switch between the languages just yet. The user has to choose the spoken language, then Ava will accurately transcribe.
We also provide translation, so if people in a conversation speak different languages, they can choose the language they speak, and Ava can translate different spoken languages into the language they can read.
Since our teams are located in the US and France, we focused our primary support on the English and French languages. However, it transcribes many languages and we continue adding more based on user request, the market, or direction from our Sales team.
6. Who is using Ava? What situations are they using it in? The Mind Hears readers are primarily working in academic settings; in what manner is Ava being used in academia?
Deaf and hard-of-hearing people are Ava’s primary users. The DHH community uses Ava when they need to communicate easily with hearing people—when they want to know what someone is saying, and speak if they are unable to voice as clearly as they would like.
In academia, Ava can be used to transcribe speech from instructors or students for anyone who is Deaf or hard-of-hearing, and also for hearing students to have transcriptions of lectures. From personal experience, having captions to understand what a professor or teacher is saying makes the lesson a lot more interesting. Accessible accommodations make a huge difference with understanding and learning.
Ava also provides Scribe service, which merges AI with a human scribe to catch nuances and improve the accuracy of real-time transcription. We also offer CART services—a service I benefited from a lot when I studied at the University of San Francisco. Our mission is to make Deaf and hard-of-hearing peoples’ lives easier and happier in any situation, including academia—that’s why Ava was created.
7. Has knowledge exchange between academia and industry played a role in the development of Ava? Are there any intersections between industry and academia that have been important in your entrepreneurial journey?
Yes, absolutely. A concrete example is that we have a team in France, and they focus on AI and speech, and most of them are researchers in academia. Most of us in the US are engineers and part of industry, and we help convert the team’s ideas into real tools, which help people. The perfect intersection between academia and industry is to make the dream come true.
8. What limitations do you see for Ava? What are the greatest challenges in getting it to work as the tool you envision it being? Where do you see technology like Ava going in the future?
I feel most comfortable using an assistive tool, whether it’s an app or device that I can use autonomously—rather than asking other people in a conversation to set up the application with a smartphone, tablet or laptop. Also, accuracy of speech is always the challenge and something we are constantly improving. Everyone within Ava is aware that the limitations lie in certain situations where there may be background noise or other reasons why accuracy is not 100%. Other companies that offer captions experience the same issues. These are the challenges we want to solve, which will be the greatest of achievements, if we can succeed.
In the future, I envision more of a Utopia, where I can wear glasses, and the caption will show up like a bubble caption attached to the speaker in the screen of my glasses. With such a device, I won’t need to ask another person to set up the device and application. And I’ll know who is speaking, no matter how many speakers there are, so the conversation is clear for me and I can keep pace with a discussion.
Also, I haven’t figured out a way for others to better understand my speaking—I can speak, but it’s unclear. I know a little sign language, but I’m used to speaking, so it would be great if there was a way to make unclear speech more clear.
9. Have you faced any challenges related to hearing-loss on your entrepreneurial journey?
Yes, there have been a lot of challenges. Communication is the pain and hardship. And the side effect of not being able to communicate as one would like is isolation, which makes me feel alone and excluded. I think that’s also why I don’t prefer to work in large companies, because I am sure the situation would be worse. On the other hand, I have been lucky as colleagues I had when I lived and worked in Taiwan accommodated my situation. And here, since I am working with Ava, which aims to help Deaf and hard-of-hearing people, the challenges due to my situation are turning less and less.
10. Do you have any advice for people with hearing loss who might be starting out on their own entrepreneurial journeys?
I was lucky, and my journey is a bit different. However, I think, regardless of any special circumstance or situation, in any stage of the entrepreneurial journey, you should not be alone. It is great if you have people who can empathize, accommodate and understand you. Surrounding yourself with people who are also passionate about the mission and understand why you want to start your entrepreneurial journey will be beneficial.
11. You are both from different countries, and through your work on Ava have likely interacted with deaf/hard of hearing people from many parts of the world. Do you have any insight to share on perceptions of deafness in different parts of the world?
I know disability accommodations are very different in different countries. Luckily, it’s the trend that technologies, including AI, are growing everywhere and have been applied in some modern countries. But for countries that don’t have advanced technology such as the Internet, I think we should try our best to support them by providing more resources.
I moved to the US because accessibility accommodations for Deaf people were better here than in Taiwan. It’s gotten better over the past four decades, but there is still a long way to go.
**In case you are wondering, TMH received no financial compensation from Ava for publishing this interview. We were just really interested to hear their story!
The new year brings a fresh start to our lives; it’s a natural time to reflect on the year past and make plans for the coming year. In what is becoming a The Mind Hears New Year tradition (see posts from 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022), we have updated our list of recommendations for making your workplace accessible and refined the layout of the recommendations. You can view and download the full list of recommendations for making your workplaces (in-person, hybrid and remote) accessible for your deaf and hard of hearing colleagues at this link. Below we provide an outline of the best approaches for increasing workplace accessibility and provide links to blog posts that explore particular aspects in detail.
Universally design your workplace: Our spaces become more inclusive for all when we improve access for any subgroup of our community. Consequently, by increasing the accessibility of our workplaces for our deaf and hard-of-hearing (HoH) colleagues, we create a better workplace for everyone. This includes hearing folks who have auditory processing disorder, use English as their second language, or are acquiring hearing loss during their careers. Chances are that someone in your department has hearing loss, whether they’ve disclosed this or not, and will benefit from your efforts to make your workplace more accessible (see The Mind Hears blog post about where are all the deaf and hard of hearing academics). This is why you should universally design your workplace now and not wait until someone who is struggling asks you to make modifications.
Sharing the work: With a google search you can find several resources on workplace accessibility for deaf/HoH employees, such as the Hearing Loss Association of America’s (HLAA) very usefulemployment toolkit. One drawback of these resources is that nearly all of the suggestions are framed as actions for the deaf/HoH employee. While deaf and hard of hearing academics need to be strong self-advocates and take steps to improve their accommodations, our hearing colleagues can help us tremendously by sharing the work to create accessible workplaces. Speech reading conversations, planning accommodations, and making sure that technology/accommodations work as intended is never-ending and exhausting labor that we do above and beyond our teaching, research, and service. Your understanding and your help can make a large impact. For example, if a speaker doesn’t repeat a question they were asked, ask them to repeat even if you heard the question just fine. The people who didn’t hear the question are already stressed and fatigued from working hard to listen, so why expect them to do the added work of asking speakers to repeat? (see The Mind Hears blog post on listening fatigue). Repeating the question benefits everyone. The changes you make today can also help your workplace align with equal opportunity requirements for best hiring practices (see The Mind Hears blog posts about applying for jobs when deaf/HoH here and here). The Mind Hears coordinated the listing of advice for different academic settings below to help you become better allies today.
One size doesn’t fit all: If a participant requests accommodation for a presentation or meeting, follow up with them and be prepared to iterate to a solution that works. It may be signed interpreters (there are different kinds of signing), oral interpreters, CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation), or Assistive Listening Devices(formerly called FM systems). It could be rearranging the room or modifying the way that the meeting is run. Keep in mind that what works for one deaf/HoH person may not work for another person with similar deafness. And what works for someone in one situation may not work at all for that same person in another situation, even if these seem similar to you. The best solution will probably not be the first approach that you try nor may it be the quickest or cheapest approach; it will be the one that allows your deaf and hard-of-hearing colleagues to participate fully and contribute to the discussion. Reaching the goal of achieving an academic workplace accessible to deaf/HoH academics is a journey.
Want to be a better ally and make your workplace accessible for your deaf and hard of hearing colleagues?Follow this linkto read our list of recommendations. We welcome your comments and suggestions either to this post or directly within the document at this link.
Our goal for The Mind Hears is to have it serve as a global resource for deaf and HoH (hard of hearing) academics. Though countries differ markedly in the degree of resources provided to deaf/HoH individuals, our hope is that this blog can be a refuge and forum for all, regardless of where you are. To date, however, most of our blog contributors and followers have been in the US and Europe. Taking advantage of the fact that Ana is Colombian, we have reproduced our Mission Statement here in Spanish in the hopes of reaching our Spanish-speaking friends and colleagues worldwide. We welcome help with translating our mission statement to other languages.
En el año 2018, Michele Cooke y yo, ambas profesoras en la Universidad de Massachusetts, Amherst, USA, decidimos empezar un blog que reflejara nuestras experiencias como personas con sordera en un ambiente académico. Así nació “The Mind Hears [La Mente Oye]”. Dada nuestra localización geográfica, las entradas del blog han sido – hasta ahora – publicadas en inglés. Con la esperanza de que este blog llegue a ser un recurso global para personas sordas trabajando en universidades, traducimos aquí la misión del blog al español. Esperamos que esto lleve a nuestros colegas de habla hispana a contribuir entradas al blog en el futuro.
Misión
Este blog está escrito por y para académicos en cualquier etapa de su carrera con algún grado de sordera. Aquí usamos el término “sordo” para representar a todas las personas con discapacidad auditiva, independientemente del grado de sordera y del modo de comunicación preferido (ya sea oral o por lengua de señas). Los objetivos de este blog son:
Proporcionar un foro para la colaboración abierta entre académicos sordos
Compartir estrategias para prosperar con sordera en el mundo académico
Fomentar una red de académicos sordos que promuevan estrategias de comunicación inclusivas en las instituciones académicas.
¿Por qué un blog?
Como académicos sordos, continuamente hemos enfrentado obstáculos en el camino al éxito profesional en entornos diseñados para y por personas sin discapacidades auditivas. Nuestras experiencias no han sido todas iguales. Dependiendo de nuestros antecedentes/proveniencia y de las instituciones en las que nos encontramos, es probable que tengamos diferencias en acceso a recursos y en la capacidad de abogar por si mismos. Debido a que la sordera puede ser una discapacidad invisible, hemos a menudo perdido oportunidades para reconocernos y aprender estrategias efectivas los unos de los otros. A través de este blog, esperamos alcanzar a académicos sordos y con problemas de audición en todo el mundo, tanto para reducir el aislamiento, como para armar una “caja de herramientas” comunitaria de recursos e ideas. La sordera es variable y puede afectarnos de muchas y diferentes maneras, pero a través de la experiencia compartida del blog, esperamos brindar algo de valor a todos aquellos que visitan y contribuyen a nuestras discusiones.
¿Por qué académicos?
Como académicos, estamos involucrados en muchas actividades que requieren comunicación continua, a menudo con colegas y estudiantes oyentes. Dictamos clases, presentamos seminarios, participamos en comités y páneles de asesoría, moderamos sesiones de discusión y dirigimos reuniones de grupo, participamos en actividades de divulgación pública y nos comunicamos con la prensa. Muchos de los impedimentos a la comunicación que se presentan en estas actividades son exclusivos al entorno académico — y el éxito de todos los académicos, oyentes o sordos, depende de la comunicación productiva en estas situaciones. Sin embargo, los académicos sordos a menudo no encontramos soluciones adecuadas para los obstáculos a la comunicación: nuestros audiólogos no tienen suficientes clientes académicos, y las oficinas de servicios para discapacitados en las universidades están diseñadas para servir principalmente a los estudiantes de pregrado (no profesores, estudiantes de posgrado u otros académicos). Al centrarnos en la comunidad académica sorda, particularmente a niveles después del pregrado, tenemos la intención de crear un recurso personalizado que ayude a todos los académicos que se identifican como sordos a alcanzar nuestro potencial profesional.
¿Por qué “The Mind Hears [La Mente Oye]”?
El título de nuestro blog proviene de una carta escrita por el autor Víctor Hugo al educador sordo, Ferdinand Berthier. Hugo escribió:
“¿Qué importa la sordera del oído, cuando la mente oye? La única sordera, la sordera verdadera, la sordera incurable, es la de la mente.”
Estas líneas encapsulan la poderosa idea que nuestro potencial para contribuir al ámbito académico, al conocimiento y a la sociedad no está limitado por nuestra capacidad o incapacidad de escuchar sonidos. Las dificultades que surgen al trabajar en entornos académicos dominados por la audición se pueden enfrentar con creatividad y resiliencia, las cuales son características de la mente. Las herramientas que las personas sordas usan para facilitar la comunicación, incluyendo la lengua de señas, la lectura labios, el uso de audífonos, los subtítulos y los implantes cocleares, por nombrar solo algunos, ilustran el potencial ilimitado del ingenio humano. La declaración de Hugo también refleja nuestra convicción de que la colaboración con la mente abierta a nuevas ideas, a la inclusión y a aquellos que abordan las cosas de manera diferente a la nuestra, puede beneficiarnos a todos. Ya sea que nos hayamos criado usando lengua de señas en la comunidad Sorda, o que recientemente hayamos perdido la audición, todos los que trabajamos en el mundo académico hemos desarrollado formas de ser exitosos. A veces podemos ver beneficios en nuestra sordera (por ejemplo, Deaf Gain), y otras veces nuestra sordera puede ser una carga no deseada (por ejemplo, Conquering faculty meetings (or not…)). Este blog es un hogar para todas estas perspectivas y experiencias. Esperamos que hallen en este blog un lugar de encuentro gratificante de mentes verdaderamente empoderadas, ingeniosas y abiertas.
The new year brings a fresh start to our lives; it’s a natural time to reflect on the year past and make plans for the coming year. In what is becoming a The Mind Hears New Year tradition (see posts from 2019, 2020, and 2021), we have updated our list of recommendations for making your workplace accessible. You can view and download the full list of recommendations for making your in-person and remote workplaces accessible for your deaf and hard of hearing colleagues at this link. Below we provide an outline of the best approaches for increasing workplace accessibility and provide links to blog posts that explore particular aspects in detail.
Universally design your workplace: Our spaces become more inclusive for all when we improve access for any subgroup of our community. Consequently, by increasing the accessibility of our workplaces for our deaf and hard of hearing colleagues, we create a better workplace for everyone (see post on the impact of the Mind Hears). This includes hearing folks who have auditory processing disorder, use English as their second language, or are acquiring hearing loss during their careers. Chances are that someone in your department has hearing loss, whether they’ve disclosed this or not, and will benefit from your efforts to make your workplace more accessible (see post on Where are the deaf/HoH academics). This is why you should universally design your workplace now and not wait until someone who is struggling asks you to make modifications.
Sharing the work: With a google search you can find several resources on workplace accessibility for deaf/HoH employees, such as the Hearing Loss Association of America’s (HLAA) very useful employment toolkit. One drawback of these resources is that nearly all of the suggestions are framed as actions for the deaf/HoH employee. While deaf and hard of hearing academics need to be strong self-advocates and take steps to improve their accommodations, our hearing colleagues can help us tremendously by sharing the work and not expecting us to bear all of the burden of creating accessible workplaces. Speech reading conversations, planning accommodations and making sure that technology/accommodations function is never-ending and exhausting work that we do above and beyond our teaching, research, and service (see post on making an impact at high stakes conferences, post on conquering faculty meetings, and post on teaching very large classes). Your understanding and your help changing our workplaces can make a huge difference to us. For example, if a speaker doesn’t repeat a question, ask them to repeat, even if you heard the question just fine. The people who didn’t hear the question are already stressed and fatigued from working hard to listen, so why expect them to do the added work of ensuring speakers repeat questions (see post on listening fatigue and post on the mental gymnastics of hearing device use)? Repeating the question benefits everyone. The changes you make today can also help your workplace align with equal opportunity requirements for best hiring practices (see The Mind Hears blog posts about applying for jobs when deaf/HoH hereand here).
One size doesn’t fit all: If a participant requests accommodation for a presentation or meeting, follow up with them and be prepared to iterate to a solution that works. It may be signed interpreters (see post on working with sign interpreters and post on networking with deaf colleagues who use interpreters), oral interpreters, CART (see post on Captions and Craptions), or FM systems (see post on Using FM systems at conferences). It could be rearranging the room or modifying the way that the meeting is run. Keep in mind that what works for one deaf/HoH person may not work for another person with similar deafness. What works for someone in one situation may not work at all for that same person in another situation, even if the situations seem similar to you. The best solution will probably not be the first approach that you try nor may it be the quickest or cheapest approach; it will be the one that allows your deaf and hard-of-hearing colleagues to participate fully and contribute to the discussion.
Want to be a better ally and make your workplace accessible for your deaf and hard of hearing colleagues?Follow this linkto read our list of recommendations. We welcome your comments and suggestions either to this post or directly within the document at this link.
The last year required a myriad of adjustments in our professional lives. For those of us in academia, much of it entailed moving our teaching and service to remote format. The pandemic isn’t over, but many universities around the world have taken steps to return to face-to-face operations. When the current semester started, we, Ana and Michele, shared notes on what aspects of remote teaching and remote working went well for us, and which we hoped to keep no matter what mode our future work takes (e..g in-person, hybrid mode, or remote; masked or unmasked). Because we experienced many of the same struggles and benefits, we haven’t attributed our experiences and discoveries to a particular person.
Teaching
Switching to remote work mode in 2020 and 2021 forced us to shake up our teaching, making us re-examine our class content and many of our class practices (see our post on accommodating a pandemic). This push towards innovation left us with several practices that we wanted to bring back with us from the pandemic — some because they are helpful with our deafness, but others simply because they seem to improve the pedagogy of our courses.
Zoom office hours can be more accessible and more inclusive than in-person office hours. Though in-person conversation always provides greater connection, students appreciate being able to drop in with a question from wherever they are, instead of making the trek across campus to our offices. This ease of access meant they are more liable to come even if all they have is a small question. Also, if we are zooming from private spaces we don’t have to wear masks, which allows speech reading (see our post on navigating masked world) – with this and auto-captions enabled we are able to follow conversations often better than we could in person.
Going online forced us to explore and use the tools available in our class management software, which we had resisted exploring fully before, primarily due to inertia. We found that we could offer better feedback and grade more equitably assignments submitted online. For example, messy handwriting is less of an issue with online assignments. We could also come up with more creative ways for students to engage with the class content and work together (e.g. challenges that involved students taking pictures of themselves with class-related content; collaborative jamboard tasks). Previously, we had over-relied on the standard think-pair-share and we found that jamboards opened new ways of having students work together. We could even set up a break-out room for folks who prefer to work on their own, rather than having them feel obligated to work with their chatty neighbor. For seminar style courses, one of us started using Perusall for reading assignments where students post questions and can comment on the questions of others. Having those discussions beforehand meant that students came to the seminar ready to engage with the material more deeply. We have continued to make use of several of the class management tools we discovered while in-person this semester.
Inertia had also prevented us from previously trying a flipped classroom approach. But in order to provide both synchronous and asynchronous learning opportunities for students while fully remote, we were essentially “forced” to flip our classroom for the first time. We discovered that we really liked it! Students seemed much more engaged/aware when they came to class having previously watched one of our videos on the topic being covered that day. We had assigned readings in the past, but it seemed like most students never read the assignments. The combination of pre-recorded videos with a required follow-up quiz led to much better questions in class and also less of a rush to try to fit a given topic within a class period, and we have continued using a flipped approach for our in-person classes this semester.
Because engaging remote students to participate was more challenging than being in-person, we started using anonymous polling. Anonymous polling tools, such as the Zoom poll, Mentimeter and Poll Everywhere, provide a powerful way to engage students. During remote teaching, we found that these anonymous polls allowed students who might have otherwise been uncomfortable to raise their hand to express their opinions. We have now tried to use some of these tools for all courses, whether in-person, hybrid or remote.
Several platforms allow written questions during live lectures. You provide a URL to the audience and they can then access a Q&A forum from their smartphones or laptops. For deaf/HoH instructors, this provides a way to understand student questions in large courses. Even before indoor mask requirements, we would struggle to understand questions or comments from folks beyond the first row (see our post about teaching large classes). One of us has experimented with receiving questions this way using Google Audience Tools in her large (~230 students) in-person lecture class this semester; in fact, this has been the strategy that has made it possible for her to interact with masked students at all . Allowing anonymous questions to be submitted has yielded more student questions, while reducing communication barriers for us as deaf/HoH instructors. It would be great to see more live presentations take advantage of this functionality and discover ways to incorporate audience/student responses to each other too.
Meetings
All of the benefits and drawbacks of remote teaching also apply for remote meetings. It can be difficult for deaf/HoH folks to follow in-person meeting discussions, and when we are leading meetings we often miss what folks contribute, which can erode the flow of meeting discussions, as it does the classroom discussions.
Faculty meetings
Faculty meetings are notoriously deaf/HoH unfriendly (see our post about faculty meetings) and during the period of remote work, we were able to participate more fully. The ability to see colleagues’ faces while talking and combination of auto-captions and generated transcript (once our institution actually purchased the zoom auto-captions option) did make it easier to follow the entirety of zoom meetings. We have fortunately continued to have remote faculty meetings this semester. One of us has had one masked in-person faculty event; at this in-person event she felt herself drift into the background, as in pre-pandemic times when speaking would reveal we had missed part of the conversation.
We have mixed feelings about advocating to never have in-person faculty meetings again. The chit-chat before and after meetings improves department cohesion. The shared laughter or groans in response to lighter moments or bad news helps camaraderie. At the same time, we recall so many times when we heard folks laugh and wondered what joke we had missed. We feel that we participate more equitably in zoom meetings than for in-person faculty meetings. Going forward, in-person meetings could be alternated with remote meetings in order to harness the benefits of both meeting modes.
Committee meetings
Pre-pandemic, committee meetings often involved scrambling to get across campus in time for the start of the meeting. Being able to participate from our offices or homes remotely, meant not only that the meeting was easier to follow (see comments above), but we also avoided missing the first few minutes in the hustle across campus. We’ve also been participating in a greater number of professional committees with folks at other universities and even from other countries. In the before-times, such committees might have met in person during one or more of the disciplinary conferences. Now that we can meet more regularly over zoom, we find this committee work to be more effective and rewarding. Maybe this is also because we can participate more fully in the remote mode than we could in person, where we were already exhausted from listening at the disciplinary conference. We have even found that the auto-captions can help us to some degree in understanding people with unfamiliar accents (see our post about unfamiliar accents).
Research collaboration meetings
Being able to share screen and annotate on the screen allows for some research discussions to follow more smoothly than in-person. Sometimes, when a group is huddled around one computer, they can’t see the screen and they end up pointing vaguely to try and describe something. The annotate tool makes it clear what folks are pointing to and still allows everyone to add to the conversation. However, one drawback of remote research meetings is that drawing with a computer mouse is horrible clunky compared to a pen on paper or whiteboard. Another benefit of remote research meetings is that our research collaborations with folks at other institutions has strengthened, as we have regular remote meetings to discuss on-going and potential projects. With captions available for remote meetings and video for speech reading, we are able to participate fully in ways that teleconference research calls did not allow pre-pandemic. The same is also true for journal club type seminars that discuss a research paper.
Invited Speaker Seminars
With the return to face to face instruction some of our seminar presentations from visiting scholars have been in-person and some hybrid or remote format. We have found that remote seminars continue to be of overall benefit, allowing us to invite distant speakers, leading to greater geographic representation. In-person seminars with and without masks have always been challenging for deaf/HoH folks. Allowing for hybrid seminars with auto-captions increases accessibility for deaf/HoH academics, but seminar hosts and/or speakers have to be cognizant about repeating audience questions to make these available to those online. What about when we have been invited to give seminars elsewhere? Given the current reality of masking indoors and the challenges this poses for our ability to speech-read our hosts and audiences, to date we have only accepted remote speaking invitations.
Academics, by nature, tend to resist changing the way we work. Our research and scholarship builds on the previous work within our disciplines. We don’t reinvent our disciplines with each new study. Experiments only change one parameter at a time in order to learn how systems work. Unless there are external factors, our tendency is to work the way that we have in the past. Data can point to better practices that slowly shift how we work over time and with slow incremental changes. While our survivorship bias leads us to make only small changes to what has worked in the past, what worked in the past for meetings and teaching was not inclusive to everyone. The covid-19 pandemic forced an overhaul of how we work. Within weeks, we adopted new approaches that otherwise might have taken us years to try. The pandemic crisis also provides a phenomenal opportunity to assess the way that we work and make wholesale changes that improve inclusion and access.
Rather than returning to the old normal, we advocate for moving forward to the new normal. This new inclusive normal uses effective practises from in person and remote teaching and meetings. We would love to hear from others on “best practices” that they have brought back with them from their pandemic experiences.
The new year brings a fresh start to our lives; it’s a natural time to reflect on the year past and make plans for the coming year. In what is becoming a The Mind Hears New Year tradition (see posts from 2019 and 2020), we have updated our list of recommendations for making your workplace accessible. The listing now includes best practices for remote meetings, a format that dominated our professional interactions in 2020 and will play a role in ‘normal’ operations going forward. While many presume that remote work increases accessibility for deaf/HoH, this is not always the case (see post on suddenly remote teaching and post on accommodating a pandemic). You can view and download the full list of recommendations for making your in-person and remote workplaces accessible for your deaf and hard of hearing colleagues at this link. Here we outline the best approach for increasing workplace accessibility and provide links to blog posts that explore particular aspects in detail.
Universally design your workplace: Our spaces become more inclusive for all when we improve access for any subgroup of our community. Consequently, by increasing the accessibility of our workplaces for our deaf and hard of hearing colleagues, we create a better workplace for everyone (see post on the impact of the Mind Hears). This includes hearing folks who have auditory processing disorder, use English as their second language, or are acquiring hearing loss during their careers. Chances are that someone in your department has hearing loss, whether they’ve disclosed this or not, and will benefit from your efforts to make your workplace more accessible (see post on Where are the deaf/HoH academics). This is why you should universally design your workplace now and not wait until someone who is struggling asks you to make modifications.
Sharing the work: With a google search you can find several resources on workplace accessibility for deaf/HoH employees, such as the Hearing Loss Association of America’s (HLAA) very useful employment toolkit. One drawback of these resources is that nearly all of the suggestions are framed as actions for the deaf/HoH employee. While deaf and hard of hearing academics need to be strong self-advocates and take steps to improve their accommodations, our hearing colleagues can help us tremendously by sharing the work and not expecting us to bear all of the burden of creating accessible workplaces. Speech reading conversations, planning accommodations and making sure that technology/accommodations function is never-ending and exhausting work that we do above and beyond our teaching, research, and service (see post on making an impact at high stakes conferences, post on conquering faculty meetings, and post on teaching very large classes). Your understanding and your help changing our workplaces can make a huge difference to us. For example, if a speaker doesn’t repeat a question, ask them to repeat, even if you heard the question just fine. The people who didn’t hear the question are already stressed and fatigued from working hard to listen, so why expect them to do the added work of ensuring speakers repeat questions (see post on listening fatigue and post on the mental gymnastics of hearing device use)? Repeating the question benefits everyone. The changes you make today can also help your workplace align with equal opportunity requirements for best hiring practices (see The Mind Hears blog posts about applying for jobs when deaf/HoH here and here).
One size doesn’t fit all: If a participant requests accommodation for a presentation or meeting, follow up with them and be prepared to iterate to a solution that works. It may be signed interpreters (see post on working with sign interpreters and post on networking with deaf colleagues who use interpreters), oral interpreters, CART (see post on Captions and Craptions), or FM systems (see post on Using FM systems at conferences). It could be rearranging the room or modifying the way that the meeting is run. Keep in mind that what works for one deaf/HoH person may not work for another person with similar deafness. What works for someone in one situation may not work at all for that same person in another situation, even if the situations seem similar to you. The best solution will probably not be the first approach that you try nor may it be the quickest or cheapest approach; it will be the one that allows your deaf and hard-of-hearing colleagues to participate fully and contribute to the discussion. Reaching the goal of achieving an academic workplace accessible to deaf/HoH academics is a journey.
Want to be a better ally and make your workplace accessible for your deaf and hard of hearing colleagues?Follow this linkto read our list of recommendations. We welcome your comments and suggestions either to this post or directly within the document at this link.
Making it as a deaf/hard of hearing (HoH) academic can often feel like a game of whack-a-mole. Between research activities, teaching duties, and that large nebulous category ‘service,’ communication challenges lurk around every corner. Some I can troubleshoot fairly quickly— i.e. arranging a classroom so there is walking space between desks and I can approach my students to better hear them (mole whacked!). Other challenges have required a few more tries, but I’ve eventually figured out viable solutions—i.e. belatedly acquiring an FM system was a game changer when it came to group discussions of papers (mole missed, mole missed, mole whacked!). But there is a situation that I have not yet been able to master, even after many, many years: the departmental faculty meeting.
I had less than a passing knowledge of that special faculty obligation that is the Departmental Faculty Meeting when I started out as an assistant professor. I’d heard some friends and my spouse—people who’d gotten faculty positions before me—mention them, usually accompanied by eye rolls. But I didn’t really have any expectations about what these meetings entailed or what my role in them might be.
Cue over to my first faculty meeting as a deaf/HoH faculty in a predominantly hearing institution. I walked into a an overly large room (overly large for the number of people we had) that looked somewhat like this:
We were 15-20 faculty seated in a classroom meant for over 40, with everybody seemingly intent in maximizing their distance from all others. After an hour of feeling like a bobblehead as I desperately twisted my neck trying to speech read my department chair in front and my colleagues in all corners of the room, I came to three conclusions:
1. Faculty (who would have thought!) are just like undergrads, and will beeline for chairs in the last rows of a room
2. Important stuff got discussed in faculty meetings (I think I caught some words that sounded like budgets and curriculum…)
3. I was dead meat, because I could not follow anything that was being said
So I went home and cried. My first year as an assistant professor, I cried after every single faculty meeting. Granted, we didn’t have that many faculty meetings back then, but enough to confirm my deep-rooted fear that I was certainly not going to survive this career path. It was clear to me in my first year that faculty meetings were whipping me soundly; if I were keeping score I would call it: Faculty Meetings 1–Ana 0.
Of course the obvious thing to do would have been to ask my department chair to change the setup of the faculty meetings. After all, my colleagues knew I was hard of hearing and relied on hearing aids for communication. But I was terrified that if my department caught whiff of how much I struggled to hear, this would sow doubts about my competence as a teacher and doom my tenure prospects. Besides, although I had a long history of self-reliance, I had zero experience in self-advocacy. Among my many thoughts were “What in the world falls under the ‘reasonable’ umbrella in reasonable accommodation?” and “oh, wait, I’m not a US citizen, does the ADA [American with Disabilities Act] even cover me?” (I still don’t know the answer to this one).
Towards the end of the academic year I found some courage to request CART (Communication Active Real Time Translation) for a final retreat-style faculty meeting. The captionists were to sit next to me and type out all discussions. My chair knew about the CART, but I (foolishly) didn’t alert the faculty. At the beginning of the meeting, a colleague expressed discomfort about the presence of unknown people in the room (the captionists). Though an explanation brought a quick apology, I felt marked. Added to the captioning time lag that at times jarred with what I could hear, I scored another loss: Faculty Meetings 2–Ana 0.
My second year brought a new department chair, a tiny increase in self-confidence, and also an increase in the frequency of faculty meetings. Aaagh! I finally resolved to approach my chair and request that faculty be seated in a round square table format during meetings so that I would have a better shot at speech reading. Simultaneously, I acquired a new FM system and a transmitter with an omnidirectional microphone — a forerunner of the one pictured here. I would place it on the center of the table and voila! OK, so it wasn’t quite 100%, and I was still missing most of the banter and jokes, but jumping from 50 to 90% comprehension (These are completely unscientific numbers. Naturally, there’s no way for me to ever tell how much I’m missing; my estimate is based on my confusion level at the end of meetings) felt wonderful. This was it! I was going to nail this faculty thing! New score: Faculty Meetings 2–Ana 1!
Then my department grew.
Okay, I get the fact that department success is gauged in part by growth. And yes, improving faculty-to-student ratios is always a good thing. But growth meant that in order to sit all of us in rectangle we were now sitting like this:
Ummm, with a gaping hole in the middle, where is microphone transmitter to go? I started putting it next to me, but of course this makes it much less likely to pick up voices from those sitting farther away. I considered going back to CART, but at this point I had had my first kid and often had to rush out of faculty meeting before the end in order to make it to daycare pickup; I couldn’t bring myself to subject others to my sometimes ad hoc schedule… so I muddled along and considered this round lost. New score: Faculty Meetings 3–Ana 1.
Fast forward a few years—the department kept growing. We were now meeting in a large room that combined my two meeting nightmares: square table arrangements with a central hole AND faculty sitting in rows (we no longer all fit around the square). Even worse… recall that faculty are just like undergrads….most actively choose to sit as far away from the center/front of the room if given an option. So much for our “round table.”
I started to cultivate the attitude recommended by some of my hearing colleagues… faculty meeting, bah, waste of time, place where people go to hear themselves talk, nothing happens there that couldn’t be solved more quickly through email….bah! OK, so attitude was my new weapon armor. By my calculations we were now at this score: Faculty Meetings 4–Ana 2. Ha! A comeback!
A few years later, further department growth and another new chair. But I told this one about my difficulties following discussions whenever we sat in rows. Alas, we were now too many faculty to sit in any sort of rectangular format that would fit in a room. I had started in a department with around 20 people and we now had more than 50! To maximize my visual contact with faculty in a room, we came up with this pretty funky rectangle with peninsula shape. Ummm… perhaps we can call this score: Faculty Meetings 4–Ana 3? We would have patented this design, but there were two problems. The perimeter of the room (around the rectangle) still had to be lined with chairs in order to have enough seating should everybody decide to show up. And see observation #1 above: faculty are just like undergrads. This means that people prefer to take the perimeter spots before they take any rectangle spots. And it turns out that people prefer to STAND IN A CORNER of the room before taking ANY of the peninsula spots in the center. New score: Faculty Meetings 5–Ana 3.
So we get to where we are today. I catch myself wondering how traitorous it is for me to dream of a smaller department while also cultivating a blasé attitude towards faculty meetings so that I release myself from feeling obligated to try and follow the discussions. In a way, this outcome is an anthesis of what a blog post on thriving in academia with deafness should be. Over a decade of trying to find a solution for a way to participate effectively in what should be a routine part of faculty life has led instead to something that resembles an arms race and I have no solution to offer. At the same time, however, this post on getting by in academia with deafness portrays pretty effectively the reality of trying to adjust to shifting communication settings as a deaf/HoH academic. I hesitate to sound as if I’m advocating “managing” as opposed to “thriving” when it comes to facing the fluctuating demands of academic life, but sometimes, while we’re whacking those moles, “managing” is what we can do.
Pandemic addendum: I wrote this post before the Covid-19 pandemic struck, never imagining the ways in which my faculty meeting odyssey would be upended yet again. The thought of meeting in-person with 40-50 colleagues now seems so distant, and new “moles” have appeared in our now virtual faculty meetings (ahem…thinking here of all those who choose to speak with their zoom cameras OFF). Yet I’ve also picked up some new management strategies in the interim… For example, Michele’s recent post points out some of the silver linings for deaf/HoH academics in working from home. And from Paige Glotzer’s profile I’ve now learned of the existence of Catchbox throwable microphones; if when life returns to normal, could this be my new faculty meeting strategy? I can’t wait to see…
We’ve all been adjusting to the ‘new normal’ of the Covid-19 pandemic. Working from home now means interacting with colleagues and students via our computers. Shopping means wearing masks and washing hands. In-person social interactions are laced with anxiety over potential Covid-19 exposure. Like me, you might have adjusted to changing conditions back in March and April with a hopeful eye towards summer—the anticipated ebb of flu season—and with it a hope for the ebb of Covid-19. But this virus has proved that it is not the flu. Covid-19 is going to be with us for a while in the United States.
So, we adjust to and accommodate this pandemic by adopting new ways to work and live. We academics are figuring out how to teach on-line, how to multitask through seminars, how to conduct meetings on-line, and how to connect with our colleagues through innovative on-line conferences. This is the new normal. We miss times past when we could stop in a colleague’s office to ask a question, interact with students after class, and walk with a friend across campus for coffee. All of those interactions are vital to building the strong connections that comprise our social network. I grieve for those lost, or temporarily misplaced, connections and feel their loss brutally. But I will tell you a secret. Something that seems preposterous in the face of our isolation and struggle to connect and support one another. My secret is that I am ambivalent about returning to in-person work on campus.
Working from home, I have far greater control over my communication environment than I do with in-person meetings/lectures/conferences. With this new normal, I don’t have to snap my head from one person to another during meetings to try and catch the fast interchange of conversation. The awkwardness of turn-taking within on-line meetings means folks don’t talk over one another. Now, I don’t have to strategize the placement of my FM system in order to best capture voices throughout the room (post about FM systems at conferences). As long as folks are using good external microphones, I can use the amplifier on my computer to boost voices. While it is still difficult to arrange for captionists or ASL interpreters for meetings during this pandemic (finding captionists has actually become much more difficult because of high demand!), I am able to use artificial intelligence-based transcription software (I like using otter.ai but there are several out there) to fill in gaps and provide some relief from listening fatigue. I don’t have to arrive to meetings early in order to grab a seat with my back to the windows so that speakers won’t be back lit.
Which seat will allow me to speech read the most people? Or should I sit where I can speech read the people likely to talk the most?
Now, as long as folks have their videos on and are well lit, I can usually speech read them OK within small to moderate sized meetings. Ryan noted in his post on sudden remote teaching that when meetings become large, you can’t see everyone well. Furthermore, Sarah Nović nicely points out the drawbacks of Zoom group meetings of both signed language users and hearing people in this BBC worklife article.
By the way, invest in a headset or external microphone and please don’t sit with your window behind you because it makes you backlit. Besides, won’t it be more pleasant for you to gaze past your computer to look out of your window during our boring Zoom meetings? If you can’t avoid being back-lit, adjust for low-light conditions (e.g., Zoom has a video settings for this).
The need to accommodate the schedules of colleagues around the globe means more recorded talks in my discipline, many of which offer some form of captions so that I can catch most of what the speakers say. With this new normal, I don’t have to sit through conference talks wondering if speaker said anything that wasn’t depicted on the slides text, graphs and figures.
Vigorous internal debate: Me: I don’t get it. Dare I ask a question?
Also me: No, the speaker probably addressed this issue and I/you just missed it.
Me: What if other people missed it?
Also me: No silly, they are all hearing. It is just me/you.
The return to in-person work, whether it happens in January 2021 or January 2022, will undoubtedly require wearing masks. As Ana explained in her post on wearing masks, this appropriate safety precaution interferes with communication for deaf and hard of hearing folks. Recently, I went into the office to water my plants and ran into some students. We all sported masks to talk with one another. While it was lovely to see them in 3D and to have a less stilted conversation than possible on Zoom, the interaction was extremely tiring for me since I couldn’t speech read their faces. Could I do this all day? No. Absolutely not. While folks rightfully complain about Zoom fatigue, the weariness that accumulates with hours of Zoom meetings, I prefer Zoom fatigue than fatigue that comes from conversing in masks.
In our accommodation of the pandemic, we are all changing the way that we work. These changes were not designed to be more inclusive and accessible to deaf/HoH academics but many of these changes have inadvertently made our participation easier and more equitable. Consequently, I am reluctant to go back to less accessible work modes – especially those involving masks. Can we apply innovations in accommodating this pandemic to help us build a more inclusive long-term post pandemic academic workplace? I hope so.
Let’s start with inclusive strategies, such as having captions for all meetings, lectures and conferences. While we are at it, let’s raise our hands in meetings and practice turn taking.
Alt text. A word cloud showing the most common appearing words in the post in different colors.
-Sarah Sparks
I had planned to write this post about listening fatigue, but as I began writing I realized that a related yet rarely discussed topic resonated more in the moment. This post is my attempt at addressing the complexity of that topic.
The mental gymnastics involved in deciding whether and/or when to use hearing devices is not discussed often—at least publicly. This can be an uncomfortable topic because the decisions about amplification use made by deaf and hard of hearing people have an impact on how we are viewed within our professions, the willingness of other people to take our accommodation needs seriously, and the assumptions made by others about our communication needs and preferences. Ideally, decisions about amplification use should be made freely. That doesn’t always happen in the context of an audist society. Some might argue that because of audism (the belief that hearing and speaking are superior to deafness and signing, and the consequent discrimination), none of these decisions are ever truly free.
I am against audism in all its forms, and I also believe it is possible to genuinely like and want amplified sound for its own sake, not because of attempts to assimilate to the hearing world. But perhaps more often than we would like to admit, deaf and hard of hearing (HoH) professionals who use hearing devices make decisions about device use based on what others expect rather than what feels best to us as individuals.
I identify as deaf. I am a full-time, bilateral cochlear implant (CI) user who also communicates in and loves both American Sign Language (ASL) and English. In times past I would wear my CI processors from the moment I woke up in the morning until about an hour before going to bed at night, sometimes topping 18 hours of device use in a day. That was exhausting, and I’m glad that I have since found a CI use pattern more suited to my needs. These days I am still a full-time CI user in that my device use averages approximately 8 hours per day, but rarely do I use my processors outside of professional situations. I’m a pediatric audiologist, and I work with many hearing children and their parents as well as the hearing parents of deaf and hard of hearing children. I care about communicating with all of them in their native language whenever possible. Because of this, my processors go on as soon as I walk into clinic in the morning and they come off as soon as I’m on my way home in the evening. If I have class or a meeting in the evening, generally I will keep them on for that purpose.
Mostly, I’m comfortable with my current CI usage. But my choices come with unique kinds of personal and professional costs that affect neither hearing professionals nor deaf professionals who don’t use devices. The decision to use my CIs as frequently (or infrequently) as I do has a downside that I don’t discuss often: the constant need to evaluate why I use them (or not). Every day, I notice how my decisions interact with others’ conscious and subconscious expectations for me not just as a deaf person, but also as a person with auditory access. Confident as I am in my decisions to switch up my communication—ASL, spoken English, or written English depending on the situation—often I find myself wondering about my CI use pattern and messages that others may infer, independent of anything I say directly.
Does using my CIs full time lead others to believe that I value spoken language over signed language? Maybe I need to clarify every other day that I love ASL and that spoken-language access isn’t the only reason I use my CIs…
Do my coworkers and other acquaintances see my CIs and assume that if my processors are on, they should always speak instead of sign? Maybe I should use my processors only when I want people to speak to me, but then I wouldn’t get to use them for many of the sounds I genuinely want to hear…
How does my CI use impact the willingness of employers and conference/event organizers to fulfill requests for accommodations? In the past, people have heard the clarity of my speech and thought I was exaggerating when I described the limits of my CI hearing. Maybe I’ll have to explain for the thousandth time that my speech is so clear because I wasn’t born deaf, lost my hearing progressively, and don’t hear nearly as well as I speak. Maybe this is why some deaf professionals who can hear and speak choose not to…
If I prefer to speechread my way through certain kinds of interactions, am I leading others to believe that I don’t need visual language? Maybe the access problems I experience are my own fault for opting to communicate in two languages…
If I remove my CI processors for a few hours while among colleagues in my profession, will they see me as irresponsible and make wrong assumptions about how I counsel my own CI patients? Maybe they’ll lose trust in me as a clinician or researcher and assume that I’m recommending lackadaisical or capricious device use…
My signing is clearly non-native: if I’m around other deaf professionals, is wearing my processors (even without batteries) necessary to remind them that I’m not a hearing person? Maybe they’ll see me as just another hearing audiologist if I’m not wearing them… or despite my wearing them…
Are my CIs sending the message that deaf/HoH people can be audiologists and hearing scientists only if we use CIs? Maybe I’m hurting someone else’s opportunities unintentionally just by trying to be deaf in the way that feels most okay for me…
What message does my observable CI use pattern send about deaf/HoH professionals who don’t use hearing devices at all or use their devices differently than I do? Maybe my own decisions affect whether they can get their access needs met…These are just a few of the questions that come to mind when I’m deciding whether to turn on my artificial, electronic auditory access. Needing to think through these and other costs of my CI use pattern is almost as exhausting as listening fatigue itself. Multiple times a day, I have to decide which is more important: using my CIs in the ways that feel best to me, or using them in ways that are least likely to result in negative consequences for me and other deaf/HoH professionals. Every day, I have to decide which battles I’m willing to fight and how my choices about CI use affect my ability to do so. I know that I can’t be the only deaf CI user who struggles with navigating these concerns both inside and outside of academia.
Alt text. A dark haired woman, with hair pulled back and dark-framed glasses is smiling. She wears a dark colored blazer and has a cochlear implant.
Dr. Sarah Sparks: Dr. Sparks holds a clinical Doctorate in Audiology (Au.D.) from Gallaudet University. She has experience in a variety of clinical settings, including a university clinic, private practice, school for the deaf, and two pediatric hospitals. She completed her final year of clinical education at Boston Children’s Hospital where she also held a fellowship in the Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Related Disabilities (LEND) program. She is currently studying at Gallaudet for a Ph.D. in Hearing, Speech, and Language Sciences. Her clinical and research interests include pediatrics, vestibular assessment and rehabilitation, cochlear implants, the audiologist’s role in counseling and self-advocacy skill development, and audiology services provided in American Sign Language. Her Ph.D. dissertation research will focus on vestibular dysfunction and its impact on deaf/HoH children.
The Mind Hears 