How Many of Us Are There?
The hearing-impaired population is huge and growing. But a surprisingly small percentage of people who need hearing aids choose to use them. Read more
A Comment on Amplified Phone Design
You can tell it’s an amplified phone by the size of the buttons. A lot of hearing impaired people are old, and a lot of old people also have trouble with their vision. Therefore, most amplified phones are designed with HUGE buttons with ENORMOUS numbers on them. It’s great the manufacturers can kill two birds with one stone. But consumers aren’t birds. I don’t need the big buttons, thank you. Read more
Bells and Whistles: My Search for the Perfect Amplified Phone
I recently went through a long process acquiring an amplified phone. If you’re a phone junkie like I am, you will want all the bells and whistles, even the ones you rarely use. Until recently, there wasn’t much to choose from. Perhaps the market for these souped-up devices was just so small, or the technology to make phones work well for hearing-impaired people was so expensive, that most phone manufacturers didn’t bother. However, recently we have seen an increasing number of options available, from both traditional and new suppliers. Read more
Resources: About.com
Jamie Berke is one of the 475 “guides” at About.com, a website that offers personal advice on everything from table tennis to headaches. She was deafened in the Rubella outbreak in the ’60s and has degrees from Gaulladet University, the leading institution devoted to deaf studies. She is About.com’s “deafness/hard of hearing” guide (http://deafness.about.com) and provides a wealth of advice and information on how to cope with hearing loss.
What About Cochlear Implants?
There’s a terrific story in today’s Wall Street Journal about the rapid increase in the number of children receiving implants before the age of three. To date approximately 10,000 children have received cochlear implants in the U.S., and the reported results are outstanding: kids who in the past would have found it very difficult to develop normal speech are able to start hearing early enough to learn spoken language at a normal developmental age. Read more