Transcript
KIRK BEHNKE: Thank you for joining us this afternoon. Thank you for joining us today for our June Tech Accelerator webinar. My name is Kirk Behnke and I will be your moderator for today's session.
Our presentation topic this month is Tools For Hearing. This is the first session of our current series, which is called Tools For Employment, Independence, and Socialization. So we'll be having tools for hearing, we'll have tools for vision, we'll have tools for reading, and then we'll also talk about switch and switch access.
This session is being recorded and the video will include a picture in picture for American Sign Language translation, as well as a full transcript. You can access that video on our website at disabilities.temple.edu. And I will put that link in the chat. That website is also where you can register for future webinars.
TechOWL has a wonderful series of 18 topics, which we have run from July of last year and will continue through December of this year. Each session will be held twice on the third Thursday of the month and offered at two times, one at 12:00 noon and then one at 4:00 PM Eastern. Both the sessions will have the same content, so you can attend whichever one is most convenient for you.
This series is part of the Tech Accelerator program, and this is an initiative funded by the Office of Developmental Programs and also the Office of Long Term Living here in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. And this is made possible through funding from the American Rescue Plan Act. You can learn more about the Tech Accelerator program and the fantastic projects on our website, using the link in the chat that either I will provide or someone from TechOWL will provide. Thank you. You did that. The information will also be sent to you in a follow up email, along with the PowerPoint and any other materials from today's sessions.
For those of you who are joining us for the first time, TechOWL stands for Technology for Our Whole Lives and is a federally designated Assistive Technology Act program serving the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. So just so you know that every US state and territory has one of these programs, and they share some commonalities, such as having a device lending library, durable medical equipment utilization programs, and they also offer training as well as educational opportunities just like this one. So if you live, or if someone who you love lives outside of Pennsylvania, then you'll want to look up their local AT Act program in order to fully take advantage of those services within their state.
OK, now to introduce you to our speaker. I'm sorry, I didn't even switch my slides here. OK. Now to introduce our speaker for today, Laura. Laura is our speaker, and she's been Pennsylvania's telecommunication device distribution program manager since October of 2018. Prior to joining the Institute on Disabilities TechOWL team at Temple University, Laura worked with adults and aging in long term care settings since 1999.
She attained a Bachelor of music and master of arts in music therapy from Immaculata University. Laura also has an active role as the business manager and singer of the longest running feminist choir in the country, called ANNA Crusis Feminist Choir. If you don't know that, you might want to look it up. She is also actively learning American Sign Language, and of course, she enjoys baking traditional Italian cookies, cakes, and pastries for friends and families. So without further ado, Laura, take it away.
LAURA GRASSIA: Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I'm just getting my slide deck up here. And as Kirk said, we will be sharing this with you after the presentation. And I just need to make this smaller. Perfect. And I'm thankful for the captioner today. I have a microphone issue during this session and I tried everything to rectify it, but I cannot.
So again, thanks for joining us. We're going to talk about tools for hearing. Let me see. So this is me and my contact information. So email and phone numbers. So please feel free to reach out if you have any questions, concerns, thoughts or if you can tell me something I missed I'd love to learn.
This presentation is going to be-- it has image descriptions. So I'm going to describe the slides. I also have alt texted all the pictures and images. We have a captioner. And there are other accommodations such as the CART provider and ASL interpreters. So accessibility is on point, hopefully, and is helpful to you.
So our goals today are going to be to discover tech that can assist your approach to hearing loss. So whether it's you or a loved one or a classroom setting or a senior citizen place anywhere, hopefully this will help teach you something new or tell you about some equipment that we might have or that is available in the world. So we're going to explore a range of tools made to enhance communication, accessibility, and the quality of life.
We're also going to learn about the practical applications of hearing tools. And we're going to make what you already have work for you. So if you have a smartphone or if you have something that's amplified or captioned, a tablet or something, this is the place for you in case you need a quick fix or somebody you encounter in your daily life could use something to help them hear.
Some terms. These terms are going to be mentioned. Some of them are old fashioned or antiquated. Hearing impaired. That is a term that seniors or the people of the silent or golden generation use a lot. It is not the term that the youngins use. They use hearing loss. Some folks use hard of hearing. Some folks use hearing disability. Nothing is wrong. It's just preference. Deafness. Deaf with a capital D and deaf with a lowercase d. So these are all some terms that you might hear or read in this presentation.
I want to go through some lofty things first and then we'll get to the specialized equipment. So some hearing facts. And this is from the Hearing Loss Association of America, which is hearingloss.org. And please feel free to visit the website below. They have a great knowledge. They have a great repository of data and also some suggestions. And it's just a great website and a great organization.
More than 50 million Americans have some degree of hearing loss. Hearing loss is the third most chronic physical condition in the US, twice as prevalent as diabetes or cancer. Hearing health tells us, and that is the Hearing Industry's Association, that hearing losses associated with other common health issues, such as diabetes and heart disease, and hearing loss is on the rise and is expected to affect 2.5 billion people worldwide by 2050.
So when granny told you to lower the volume on your headphones, she wasn't wrong. So make sure you practice that hearing safety and turn down the headphones. Turn down the music. Your hearing is very important and it doesn't last forever.
So some impacts of untreated hearing loss are avoiding and withdrawing from social activities, reduced alertness, and increase risk to personal safety. The number one way I could tell if I had the attention of my seniors and my activities is if they were nodding off, then we would check the hearing aid or I would move closer to them and they would be wide awake again. So that's an important tell.
Impaired memory and the ability to learn new tasks. You might be irritable. You might be angry or frustrated. The people around you might be that way as well, because they can't communicate properly with you because you can't hear. Fatigue, tension, stress, depression. This is a loss. So hearing loss means all these things could happen.
Social rejection, loneliness, and relationship strain. When my dad's hearing aids are not working correctly, my mom is the first person to know and the first person to tell him or yell at him, I should say. It can reduce job performance and it diminishes psychological and overall health in general. So betterhearing.org, that is that Hearing Industries Association, they have some great resources. I put the website at the bottom for you to review.
I'd like to talk about now the Telecommunications Relay Service. And it's commonly referred to as TRS. And that is a well established system in telecommunications. So telecommunications is communicating distantly. So not face to face. It is through the telephone, through the internet. And that could be a video, voice, or text message. It allows people who are deaf, hard of hearing, deafblind, or have speech disabilities to communicate with standard telephone users through a communication assistant or artificial intelligence.
And AI, Artificial Intelligence, is kind of newer. It's within the last couple years that people have been-- manufacturers and the creators of equipment and apps and things have been using that. Most commonly, AI is like Google Live Transcribe. But we're going to get into that.
So this is right off the FCC's website. So the Federal Commission on Communication. So this is offered federally. So not all of the services are in each state, but most of them, like the traditional PTY based TRS's, and that uses a teletypewriter, a TTY. And that's for text communication relayed by the communication assistant. So TTYs are kind of becoming extinct in the world, and that is because the analog copper lines are disintegrating and there is no push to service those lines.
Now the push is to go to a digital line such as fiber optics. There's also satellite. There's a whole bunch of other types of digital services for telephone lines. This is a problem because there are still folks that use TTYs. And we do have an option for those folks if they want to learned something new, and that would be a wireless device, a cell phone or a tablet. So we'll get into that.
The next one is voice carryover, so VCO. It allows someone who has a hearing disability to speak directly and receive text responses from the communication assistant. Hearing carryover is kind of the opposite. It allows someone with a speech disability to hear the conversation and type their responses, which the communication assistant reads out loud.
Deafblind service allows people with combined vision and hearing loss to place and receive telephone calls. So DBS users type their messages and read the other person's responses typed by a communication assistant on a Braille display. So this service is for people that have both combined hearing and vision loss. And they use a Braille display. So they have to know Braille.
Speech to speech. That's when the communication assistant who is specially trained to understand speech disorder, that person re-voices what the caller with the speech disability is saying so that their message is understood by the other person on the line.
Video V-- sorry, Video Relay Services, VRS, uses video conferencing for ASL communication with the communication assistant who acts as an interpreter. So there are video phones and there are specialized equipment for this type of service. Now there's an app for that. So there's quite a few apps and we'll get through them at the end of the presentation.
So way back I think in the 20-- not sure exactly when, but at least by 2015, internet protocol caption telephone services and internet protocol relay services, IP relay, these were introduced. So this is a specialized piece of equipment and it uses internet connectivity. So whether it's ethernet or hardwired or Wi-Fi to provide captions of the other party's conversation, allowing the user to simultaneously read and listen. That's so that they don't miss any words that they hear. So it's pretty important for understanding. But IP, Internet Protocol, is all through the internet and not through the traditional telephone lines.
So if you'd like to learn more, Pennsylvania's relay service is provided by Hamilton Relay. And they have a website and you could search PA relay or dial 711 if you have to call someone with a hearing disability. What's wonderful about the communication assistance is if you've never used relay services, they will tell you how to do that before the call is placed.
So I think that's a really amazing thing, because there is a special, I don't want to say code, but it's a code, to use that service so that you know when to stop talking or even to end the call. So that communication assistant is very helpful. This service is 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. So they never take a vacation. There's always someone there to answer the call.
All right. So if you have any questions, please put them in the chat. And then there will be time at the end so you can ask your questions by voice if you prefer. So we're going to discover tech right now. And device demonstrations are available at your local assistive technology resource center. So if you wanted to compare and contrast devices, you would be able to make an appointment and try those devices.
And if you wanted to further try them, you could borrow equipment from the statewide lending library. So we have a statewide lending library. Every state does. And that library can provide you with specialized equipment. It's shipped to your house. You can use it for five weeks and then you would send it back. And this is kind of like the try before you buy process. I think it's a great idea so that you're not buying all this expensive equipment and then it doesn't work for you and then what do you do with it.
So next, you could ask your primary care physician or see an audiologist. Audiologists can be nestled in the ear, nose, and throat doctor's offices. They have experience with equipment and they might have referrals. So it's a great resource there.
And finally, you can join a support group and crowdsource. So support groups for hearing loss. They are the Hearing Loss Association of America, HLAA. They provide regional support groups and events. So you could look on the HLAA website and find a support group near you. You might just catch me or one of my colleagues chatting with them as well. We do a lot of presentations with those groups.
So I wanted to include this slide, hearing tests or audiometry, just in case. Or maybe hold this in the back pocket in case this potentially would help you. Now, in this picture, I picked this one because I figured a few folks on the call might be on here who went to school in the '50s and the '60s. This is a woman who is working her audiometer. And she is sitting across from a child with headphones on, and she's adjusting the dials and hoping that the child can hear the different frequencies.
So I'm sure that you've had this done at school. So these types of tests evaluate your ability to hear, and they can also detect what type of hearing loss you have. So there's mild, moderate, and severe. There is also profoundly severe. But we're just going to go to the severe level at this time. Audiologists can recommend treatments like hearing aids and cochlear implants.
Most people in the US have had hearing screenings during their lifetime. So you might not remember this one, but right after you were born, you had one to confirm whether you could hear or not. Children as part of their well checks or at school. And I remember distinctly at school, even though I went in the '80s, we had hearing tests in grade school or elementary school. And adults. So if you have an issue with hearing, you can hear people talk, you have to turn up the volume on the TV or radio, it might be time to go get a hearing test. It's always good to have a baseline as well.
So the audiologist has a certain amount of tests. They have types of tests that you can learn about. And so pure tone testing is pretty common. And this finds the quietest volume that you can hear. And that's the one where it's the high and the low frequencies. And you raise your hand if you can hear them. There is also bone conduction testing. And this shows any issues with the tiny hairs in your cochlea. So it sends vibrations to the auditory nerve and then they hopefully will go to the brain.
Speech testing shows how you understand speech. So this one was a great one for me, and it showed that I did not understand speech. So you're given a whole bunch of words and you have to say them back. And sometimes you hear them. Sometimes it sounds like Charlie Brown's teacher. So auditory brain stem response checks the connection between your inner ear and your brain. Otoacoustic emissions checks inner ear function. And tympanometry checks how well your eardrum moves. So I did include a source there for the Cleveland Clinic. It's a pretty good source for learning about things, medical diagnostic stuff.
Alrighty. So now we're going to learn and explore some equipment here. Now, this is actual tactile equipment. You can touch it. You can wear it. I encourage you to reach out to your AT program in your state and get a demo and try this stuff out. It's pretty neat.
So we have amplified phones and accessories. You'll see here that we have the Clarity BT 914 on the left. It's a cordless phone with large handset buttons and also an answering machine. So some landline equipment. It is drastically reduce requests for this type of equipment, but we still have those folks with landlines that need a little boost.
So that BT means Bluetooth, and that means you can Bluetooth up to two, either a cell phone or a headset or something, so that you don't have to hold the handset or you can have that amplified phone call on your cell phone. So it's pretty neat equipment there. There is no talking keypad, but the buttons are pretty big, the numbers and stuff. So that might be good for someone with low vision.
To the left, there we have that box with the strobe light. That is a clear sounds ringer flasher signaler for a landline. We see these paired with TTYs or with amplified phones. There is a speaker there on the right side with a very loud ringer. And then there's that strobe light. There's toggles on the bottom. You can adjust the tone, how many times, or the flashing pattern, I should say. And also how loud the alerter alerts.
Down on the bottom there, underneath that signaler there is a amplified answering machine. It's a lovely piece of equipment. It amplifies louder than the subway runs. So there's also big buttons. And you also have three slow talk modes. So if you can't understand the message, you could play it again at a slower speaking rate. And if you can't understand that, then you can also go down two more speaking rates. So that's pretty neat.
There's also an inline phone amplifier and that's that clarity telephone amplifier. It's that kind of white device with that little cord sticking up at the top. And that would bypass the handset of a corded phone. And there's that toggle there that you can adjust. This one really is only-- it really only works well with an analog phone line, those old fashioned copper lines that come from the wall, because there is a lot of static on a digital line.
We have our tried and true up top there, the Clarity Alto Plus. It has a lovely volume wheel that you can adjust the ringer and also the voice on the other line with that little rolly volume button. And has awesome backlit buttons and a really large caller ID display. And on the right side, that is the cell phone amplifier.
And you'll notice that it kind of resembles a handset. So that thing up top there, where you put your ear, is an acoustic cup. And it has a rubberized gasket on it. So it forms a great seal to your ear. And you would Bluetooth your existing cell phone to that. You could also pop this on the car visor and have amplified phone calls in the car.
And we're going to go right over to our caption telephones. I'm going to go to the middle one that says, "hi, grandma, how are you?" That is the a Cadillac version of our CapTel 2400I, I meaning Internet. So this is one of the phones that requires a phone line and internet in order to generate the captions. What's really cool about it is it could be a speakerphone. It's also a touchtone phone.
There's a way to turn off the captions if someone that doesn't have hearing loss wants to use the phone. Then there's also a one button dialing to the customer service agent at the CapTel. So it would be the PA relay or Hamilton. And they would be able to troubleshoot phone issues or service issues or something like that. This phone is very easy to set up. And it's also amplified to a certain degree.
Now, on the left side here, we have the Clarity XLC8. And this is a voice carryover. So basically someone would pick up that handset and speak and then read the captions from the caller. This requires a phone line and Wi-Fi in the home. And it also uses the artificial intelligence. So there's no relay person. It's a completely private call.
And it's a really great phone for someone with hearing loss. It can amplify up to 50 decibels. It rings at 90 decibels, which is when the subway passes. That's how loud that is. It comes with a little wireless hub that would hook on to the Wi-Fi at your house. So it's a pretty inexpensive way to have captions in the home.
We also have a Clarity Alto. And that top right corner there. This one is another option for folks that don't have internet at their house. So this would work on the phone line. And on that left side, that black box there, that's called a voice to text converter. So that voice to text converter does exactly what the name is. It converts a voice to text. And that text is displayed on the screen via AI. So there's no relay person in the middle. This is a very expensive way. This is about a $1,200, $1,500 phone combo pack here. Not a combo, but a package, I should say. So this is for folks that don't want internet but want the captioning.
Next, we have some alerting devices and signallers. So these are for folks to use in the home. So if they would need extra alerting if they couldn't hear certain things. So the first thing we have here is on the left at the top is our Bowman. Sorry, Symfon and Bellman. Or Bellman and Symfon Vibio Bed Shaker. This little square device, it's probably the size of a coaster.
I love this device. It has a snooze tail. So if you want to snooze the alarm, you pull the tail and that will snooze it. And you can set how many minutes your snooze is on the app that you have to download. What's really neat is that once you set it through the app, you can turn off your phone, and that bed shaker will still work. So that's cool. Deaf and hard of hearing people, they put this under their pillow or under the mattress, between the mattresses, and it will vibrate and wake them up.
Next is a bright light signaler. So this will flash. It can be hooked up to a transmitter, to the doorbell, or to a phone. So another Bellman and Symfon bright light signaler. The next device over. So that blue portion where that phone is resting is the flasher. And it rings and flashes when a notification comes through. Now that phones are a little bit more techier, it actually works through radio waves.
So not through a digital app or something. It's a little bit primitive now. But you used to be able to plug in through your earphone jack and plug into it, and that's how it would signal. Now it just knows. It just rings and flashes. This is a really great model for-- you can charge your phone. It's not wireless charging, but you can plug it in through the cords go through that underneath part where the phone rests. There's also some settings on the side. You can adjust for the flashing patterns and the ringing signalers as well.
So over to the right is the home aware system from Sonic Alert. This is a receiver. It can be hooked up to your smoke alarm, your doorbell, a baby monitor. So there's lots of accessories that could be hooked up. And this lets the user know what is happening around them. So if the smoke detector's going off, it will say smoke. If the baby is crying, it will say baby. So there's some other settings you can go through that.
On the bottom left is the Sonic Alert alarm clock. So this alarm clock, it rings at-- it alerts, sorry, at 98 decibels. And it has additional accessories like a corded bed shaker. And that's all the way to the right. Also, I love this one because it has a lamp feature. So the alerting could be a lamp flashing on and off. And then if you wanted to use the lamp to read, you would just hit that yellow button that says Lamp and the lamp would go on. So it's pretty neat. We see a lot of these go out in the lending library when kids go to college, because they're not home anymore and their mom won't be waking them up anymore. So they have to get up on their own.
And the next and final thing on the page in the middle of that bottom row is called the square glow. And you'll see in the picture there are two squares and they glow. And they also have some ringing patterns as well. All the colors you could think of. And this is a doorbell model. So the doorbell is the little black piece in there, the black button. And then there is a receiver there. I'm sorry, a transmitter.
And you can hook this up so that when someone rings the doorbell, it will flash. There's home kits that you can hook up to your phone to alert that your phone is ringing and other accessories. So this is an amazing piece of equipment created by a deaf guy named Julio. And he's really taken deaf folks' suggestions and really made this into a really neat piece of equipment. So we also have this in our community space on campus. It lets us know when the door opens so we can serve the customer.
So we have our assistive listening devices. And so these are some options. I'm going to briefly go through them. On the top left, we have a bone conduction headset. So the gentleman is wearing this. You can see that it's not stuck in his ear canal. It is on the outside of the ear. And that way he can hear his surroundings. So this creates a vibration in that bone there. And that's what the sounds passes through. We see these a lot used with active people, whether you're on a bicycle or running. I use these when I run and they are fabulous because I can hear everything around me.
So these are some-- the next few items we have on the top is called the Conversor Pro Plus. And below that, we have the Bellman Audio Domino Pro FM system. So these are some devices. You place one of them where the sounds is happening and then you can hook headphones up. So you plug it into the remote. And that will put the sounds in your ear.
So that way you can hear the speaker or the television. Some folks even wear something that's around their neck, and you have the headphones in your ears and they would hear you. I'm sorry. You would hear them. Pardon me. So these devices are usually rechargeable batteries.
And they're pretty neat pieces of equipment. We're going to get into smartphones in a little bit, and you're going to see some other ways to have assistive listening on your smartphone. But these are actual physical devices. Some folks just like an added piece, especially if they're senior or if they're old school. They don't want to have a phone. They want to have something else.
So this other thing on the bottom here on the left is called the BeHear Axis. And what's really cool about this one is that that little thing in the middle that looks like Pac-Man is the charging cradle. So this is great for folks with arthritis or have trouble plugging in things, like plugging into little ports.
So this is a really great way to charge it. You would place that around your neck like a scarf and put those earbuds in, and you would be able to adjust the sound. And also mono directional and omnidirectional. So mono is one way. Omni is always. So you can adjust that as well.
There's the next one over is great for seniors. That's called the BeHear SMARTO. And that little remote in the middle has some great big buttons. And there's some colored buttons there as well, red and green. You pop the headphones on and it's sort of like a-- it'll pick up the sounds around you. That way you can hear conversations better and things like that.
We also have to the right is one of my favorites. It's the amplified TV listener. And that's the stethoscope style. And basically, there is a transmitter you place by the television, and that transmits the sound into these little headset, into the ears. So listening ears. There's a whole bunch of different brands. But this is the G mark brand. And they even used to make hearing aids stethoscope style as well. So I had a vet one time in the veterans hospital back in 2002, and he had this type of model hearing aid. So very bulky, but he couldn't hear without it.
And last but not least, we have the Williams Sound Pocket Talker. And you would plug in a headset into this thing. And that little black thing on top is the microphone. And you would point it in the direction of the sound you wanted to hear, and it would amplify into your earphones. So all of this is available to borrow in the lending library at TechOWL.
And I couldn't get away without saying something about over-the-counter hearing aids. So if you wanted to learn more about that, the HLAA website, hearingloss.org, has lots of great information. I left the website there at the bottom. And over-the-counter hearing aids, they're not installed by a hearing aid fitter.
You find some and you put them in and you Bluetooth them to a device and that's how they work. Some of them come with a little box that you can use as a transmitter. So they come in all shapes and styles. They're also less expensive than your hearing aids that would be prescribed. They range between 250 and 1,200, $1,250. So some of them are very small and some of them are not so small.
Now, my favorite topic is smart devices or smartphones, tablets. So they can do most of all what we talked about before here. So to the left here I have an emergency notification screen from the Android operating device. I also have in the middle there, that's the iPhone sound recognition app or accessibility feature. It's a siren, a sound that has been recognized as a siren.
And that's how folks-- some folks don't use those bulky devices. They use their smartphone to be their ears. And then I have a screenshot of the CapTel. So this is Hamilton by CapTel app. This is a captioning app for phone calls. And this is available on both operating systems.
So these are all the things that smart devices can do. They still can do most of it. And I put most because they can't do everything. They can't make you a cup of coffee. Or can they? I think they might. There are Wi-Fi and apps for that for Keurig and things like that. But alerting device. The smartphone has vibration or it uses flashing notifications with the camera flash. Live caption or live-- so Google Live Transcribe.
They can caption conversations. They can caption calls. You have your personal listening device, hearing aids, cochlear implants, or just your Bluetooth headset or earbuds. I use mine all the time to listen to the television, because I can't understand. The distance from the television sound speaker to my ear is just too far away, and it just gets wonky. So instead of that, we have the earbud right in the ear, and the phone hears and transmits that sounds to the ear.
You have voice assistants, Siri or Google. Real time text is the cell phone's way of making a TTY. So you can have AI generated captions, or you can actually have a communication assistant come in and caption that call. This is a newer option. It's not as well known. It is like text messaging, but without having to hit send. So you can't write crazy things. You have to just be direct and not delete when you want to type something, but then delete it. The other person will see it.
There is also text to speech, speech to text, video relay services with an app, hearing devices, hearing aid compatibility and applications, and also those headphone listening safeguards. So it can be very helpful to save your hearing.
And I spoke about this just a few seconds ago. Your smartphone accessories. So Apple has what's called Made For iPhone and then Made For iPad, iPod, MFI. So that's what that stands for. They can act as a listening device, TV ears. There's models that have noise cancellation and transparency modes so that you can run or ride your bicycle and hear your surroundings. They are more expensive, but they have a more unified user experience.
When you go to the Android system, it's everything else. So there's no certification. They don't have MFA. It doesn't exist for Android. So any Bluetooth hearing, any Bluetooth earphones will work. There's more choices. There's a better price range, but it's a less unified experience. So sometimes those cheaper or less expensive devices, they're not as good. Sometimes the Bluetooth doesn't connect. So that's something to think about.
Here are all the hearing aid and smartphone apps. Not all of them, but there's a lot of them. I listed them just in case you wanted to do research later. There's a lot of companies out there. So I have the black device is a cochlear implant with processor. And then on the right there, that silver thing is a hearing aid.
And apps for phone calls and video calls. So on the left, we have Caption Call, InnoCaption, Nagish, which is a newer one, and then our Hamilton Mobile CapTel app. So this is just a couple of them. This isn't all of them. And we have the video call apps, VRS. So Convo. nTouch is the Sorenson app. Sorenson is a big name in relay video calls and things. And then there's also purple. So P is for purple.
And finally, I want to encourage you to talk the talk. So when speaking with someone who is hard of hearing in person, it's really great to face the person at a close enough distance for them to understand you. So speak slowly and clearly. Speak loudly, but there's no need to yell.
And when speaking with someone who's hard of hearing on the phone, you want to speak directly into the receiver. So no shoulder balancing or speakerphone or anything. You speak directly into that receiver. Speak slowly and clearly. Offer to spell your name using a word that begins with each letter. And I suggest that you learn the military alphabet. I've done that. I actually have a laminated military alphabet in front of my computer so that I can limit the pauses of having to think of what word goes with each letter. So the military alphabet that is most used in the world.
And a pro tip when leaving your phone number on a voicemail, say each number slowly and deliberately, so you only need to say it once. I can't tell you how many calls I can't return because they either rush through the number or I just can't understand the message because they're speaking too fast. So just think everybody's hard of hearing and just slow down a little.
Now, I'd like to open it up for some questions. If you'd like to unmute. Or Kirk, can you check the chat for me, see if there's any questions?
KIRK BEHNKE: Sure. Michelle asks, are there any over-the-counter hearing aids available for children?
LAURA GRASSIA: Oh, I'm not exactly sure of that. I would totally go with the primary, their pediatrician for that. I think children need that extra help. And who would pay for that? I would think that their insurance could cover hearing equipment. I just think adults are Medicare, Medicaid. They don't cover the insurance. They don't cover the hearing aids. But I haven't heard of any. Yeah, I would check with HLAA or even ask your audiologist, Michelle.
KIRK BEHNKE: Michelle said the law said not for under age 18, but maybe it changed. Is that for Medicare?
LAURA GRASSIA: So I know the law was from the Biden administration, or I think that's when it came into effect. But yeah, I'm not aware of any changes.
KIRK BEHNKE: Yeah, I'm not either. Good question though. But I would also say that check with, as Laura said, check with your primary care physician. And then they might make a referral to an audiologist and/or a speech language pathologist if you feel like there's a deficit there. And then they could then either make the referral and/or other suggestions for possibly an audiogram, find out where the child is missing, any type of hearing deficits, et cetera, and then move on from there.
LAURA GRASSIA: Yeah, I think children-- I don't think I would mess around with that, just because the impacts of hearing loss in children and their speech. And that's important to get services right away to help that so there's no delay in school.
KIRK BEHNKE: Yeah. It is becoming a little bit more blurred. The whole over-the-counter devices that are available and the accommodations, it's one of the double edged swords about having more universally designed accommodations available to you. But then again, are those available to you at all times and all places and who will be responsible for purchasing those or acquiring those? And then also who's there for the maintenance and the follow up and all that? So that's a really great question, Michelle. Thank you.
LAURA GRASSIA: It is, yeah. A lot of gray area. Any other questions?
KIRK BEHNKE: I don't see any other chats, Laura. We're just right on time. So I want to thank you once again for your presentation today. It was very comprehensive and I love the flow and it was great. If you could also, our participants, if you would take a short survey, we would really appreciate that. There's a QR code there. And we look forward to seeing you at another webinar next month, in July. Third Thursday of the month. And we will be doing AT for reading, I believe.
