Why aren't we told what hearing loss really means?

#1  I'm feeling a little lost I see all these posts about equipment people can get ? They just shoved me my hearing aids and off I got sent 🤷‍♀️. I told them I'm finding it really hard with the phone and hearing on it they weren't bothered said this is all they can do 🤷‍♀️.

#2  I agree, all of the support and information I have received has come from being part of this group, thanks, everyone.

#3  This is at the root of all HoH issues, isn't it? 'You have hearing loss, off you go with a hearing aid..' then when the aid is no longer able to effectively allow you to hear properly, that's it. There is no advice day one, your hearing could and probably will get worse to the point the aid is mere decoration, so you should start learning how to cope with that inevitability.  But no awareness or support exists designed for that.

Instead, we tend to breathe a sigh of relief the aid enables us at least to a point where we are just about comfortable with it, and noting an occasional sound here and there, then when it doesn't we ask about CI's, or text option/assistive devices AFTER having spent years not bothering. If we aren't in total denial, we are naive as to future possibilities and not equipped ourself if/when it happens.

Its no use when we finally admit to ourselves, that's it, I am to all intents and purposes deaf now, and THEN complaining there are no systems in place to help us 'move on' Moving on starts when you are diagnosed as needing a hearing aid, NOT, after it is no longer any use to you. You would think we learn but we never do. We live in hope mostly and hang in there for the faintest of sounds we can still manage. To then attempt sign language, change of lifestyle, and social areas, or take a stab at lip-reading is too late, our die is cast.  over 86%+ fail.

Neither sign/lip-reading systems are designed for the loss experiences you have, we should have demanded proper systems at day one, then, coping and managing would be far less an issue. I don't know anyone who has spent half a lifetime HA dependent and then losing that, who has then successfully managed any coping transition after that works, either you do it day one or not at all. 

I Just wish I had taken my own advice then. You get lulled into a false sense of coping and then the reality kicks in and there is nothing there basically.  Today we live for the technology to communicate as none of the traditional approaches of sign or lip-reading work if they ever did.

Technology and the deaf community.

Technology & the Deaf community from Maren Garcia on Vimeo.

Kudo gains Kudos.

KUDO has just made the web conferencing space more inclusive. 

The Manhattan-based startup now offers real-time sign language interpretation for web conferences or video conferences. At the click of a button, deaf participants to a meeting can get a pop-up window of an interpreter signing into the appropriate language. Image quality is crisp, with a negligible latency of 200ms. 

The solution works as well on computers as it does on smartphones. The cloud-based web conferencing platform already allowed users to add language interpretation to meetings small and large. With KUDO, participants are free to express themselves in their mother tongue, with human interpreters doing the translation live from remote hubs throughout the world. KUDO’s sign language release is a laudable push for more inclusion in corporate meetings. Their release coincides with the thirteenth anniversary of the enactment of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. 

Over the years, the resolution has been adopted by more than 170 governments, which have committed to protecting and upholding the dignity of those living with disabilities. But the corporate world has been slow in catching up. Sign language is a broad and wild universe. It encompasses many different languages, with each country developing its own set of signs. For English alone, there is British Sign Language (BSL), American Sign Language, Australian Sign Language (Auslan), and a few more. 

There are also variants in Spanish, Portuguese and French. KUDO accommodates all of them. And it does so quite affordably, as interpreters don’t have to travel. Disseminating the use of sign language is a major milestone in inclusion. It empowers the deaf to fully participate in meetings in a language they can understand. “KUDO is all about inclusion,“ explains KUDO’s CEO Fardad Zabetian, himself an immigrant. “We are very happy to include the deaf community. 

No other video conferencing platform does that.”

SOURCE

Labour routed, Corbyn out.

The British public have delivered a resounding rebuff to the hard left in and around London, and to Europe, who have tried for 3 years to defeat British democracy.  London-centric media of all types also shown up for being so out of touch with the rest of the UK they did not see it all coming. We saw BBC presenters grovelling at their mistakes and bias too.

So the EU remainers are now trudging home, bedraggled and soaked through dragging their blue flags behind them. We  ARE leaving the European Union, perhaps the biggest shock of all was the Labour party unable to capitalise on the issues of the NHS, an issue they believed was a vote-winner to prevent nasty Americans buying it all up and making a mint in the process.  Of course, the USA is ONLY Interested in an area they can make a profit from like any investor, and the British NHS was never designed to ever make a profit.

The 'Score on the Doors' was pretty damming of the wishy-washy lefties, the labour party's Russian-backed Momentum group,  and extremes of a minority London focus groups, all left with enough egg on their faces to make an omelette for most of Islington.  

The UK has now spoken twice, we want out of the European superstate and their ridiculous and discriminatory arrogance of law-making.  We encourage other European members to follow our lead and dump the German-French monopoly over the other countries and allow them to re-erect borders that WORK for the safety of all and re-elect laws that protect the victims of crime and not empower the criminal, the terrorist or the fake asylum seeker.

Will the now obsolete 'Deaf-UK' and pro-EU BSL site now shut shop, and get a life in the process?  We can but hope.