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Gutted at seeing yet another set of online events I probably won't be able to attend (and given my deafness was one of the reasons I had no choice but to leave my lecturing job), here is a thread on why people who appear to be hearing in person may not be able to hear you online:
In person, I position myself to hear as much as I can. I'll skip around you, I'll sit at the front. If there's a loop and event organisers have remembered to switch it on, I'll use it with my hearing aids. These things all help me catch sounds BUT background noise of any kind...
steals voices. I can't hear you in a cafe, or at a meal, or in a classroom or meeting when everyone chimes in. I lipread all the time. I see voices as much as I hear them. I was born profoundly deaf in one ear and my hearing is getting worse in the other, but I do have...
hearing privilege. I can lipread well, so many people don't realise I'm deaf in person. Online, I can't lipread. Poor connections mean mouths dance out of sync with sound. I have to have the volume up high, but voices are distorted and background noise is unbearable.
One on one with captions, I can muddle through, but end up with a piercing headache after an hour. A meeting with more people is horrendous. It costs me energy and causes me pain to listen online and process the noise and captions and try to make sense out of it all.
(In comparison, TV and film generally have much, much better sound quality, mouths are in sync allowing for lipreading and captions are widespread, although of varying accuracy)
Online platforms vary in what they offer to help. A trained captioner will always be best, automated captions can be dodgy, but have still helped me lots. People using good quality headset microphones and treating their recording environment as just that makes a big difference
But it can't be okay for events, classes, meetings, everything to move online without considering access, esp publicly funded work, orgs and institutions. 1in6 adults in the UK has hearing loss. When you don't use captions, do you have any idea how many people can't hear you?
