Assistive Technology

    But first, it is important to consider "The Hearing Aid Myth."

The Hearing Aid Myth

Brenda Battat and Donna L. Sorkin

Over 80% of all hearing loss is sensorineural, which means that the source of the problem is damaged hair cells in the cochlea. Although this type of hearing loss is generally not amenable to medical or surgical treatment, hearing aids often can be of benefit.

That being the case, you may wonder why students with hearing aids still request accommodations to be able to hear in class. The expectation by many people is that the hearing aids will correct hearing as glasses do vision, but this is not the case. Hearing aids provide amplification of sound that is very helpful. But there are other problems some people who are hard of hearing experience, such as not being able to discriminate the speech sounds they can hear, even with added volume, and not being able to isolate speech from background noise. Hearing aids alone do not correct these problems.

Hard-of-hearing students are individuals who come in all shapes and sizes, and so do their hearing losses. As a result, their ability to understand speech varies greatly, as do their needs in the classroom. Communication access has to be customized to meet the student's needs and may include hearing aids, communication strategies, assistive technology, note taking, computer assisted realtime transcription (CART), or some or all of the above.

Assistive technology can stretch a hearing aid's capability. Three types -- FM, infrared, and audio loop systems -- in conjunction with the hearing aid can increase intelligibility of the teacher's voice for a student by bringing the sound directly to the student's ear and by cutting out background noise that otherwise would compete with the teacher's voice. This technology may make enough of a difference that a student will be able to hear in class when he/she couldn't with hearing aids alone, and, depending on the level of hearing loss, the student may or may not need a front seat.

Even so, with hearing aids and assistive listening devices, students who are hard of hearing will still be working hard to hear. It's probably safe to say they can never relax and just absorb what the teacher is saying. They have to go through an additional step of listening intently to process what they are hearing and then form a reaction to it. The listening and processing part alone takes a lot of energy. In addition to hearing aids and assistive technology, they will be using speechreading and any other strategy they know to help them understand speech. All their efforts to hear are dependent upon factors that affect speechreading such as lighting, the instructor's teaching style, and room acoustics. As to why students may request note takers, many people with hearing loss cannot watch the speaker for speechreading, ensure that their hearing aids and assistive devices are in sync, and take notes at the same time.

In essence, many students will be using a combination of technology, communication strategies, and every inch of concentration just to hear, and even with all that, it is entirely possible that some students, depending on their needs, will still not get everything said in class. Even though they may hear most of what the teacher says, there is a good chance that unless they have all the appropriate assistive technologies, or the teacher remembers to always repeat what the other students in the class are saying, the student will miss questions and comments from the class... Although they definitely will be working hard to do so, hard-of-hearing students can and do succeed at achieving communication access. They are able to do so when they have responsive teachers and school administrators who facilitate their requests for accommodations and are determined to educate themselves and others about strategies for communication.