Hearing Loss LIVE! in Five: Ableism

Do we experience ableism in regards to hearing loss? You bet and we talk about it here. Ableism definition: “Ableism is the discrimination of and social prejudice against people with disabilities based on the belief that typical abilities are superior. At its heart, ableism is rooted in the assumption that disabled people require ‘fixing’ and defines people by their disability.”

Read more in our post on Ableism: 
https://hearinglosslive.com/ableism-hearing-loss/

For a transcript of this podcast, see our BuzzSprout site:
https://hearinglosslivepodcast.buzzsprout.com/

Transcript

Welcome to Hearing Loss LIVE! In five. 

Julia: Good morning, and welcome to Hearing Loss LIVE! in five. So we have decided to roll out a five minute small podcasts for information that we've been going over kind of in depth, we were going to pick a different part of a different project. Different thought and give you some five minute shorts. Remember, subscribe, like, share, we want you to do all of the above with our material. We want to get the word out there, we're here to stay, and we're here to help demystify hearing loss. So this short, is going to be about ableism. Ableism at its definition, as I have found on accessliving.org, there's a couple of different ways out there Oxford dictionary has one so on so forth. Ableism is the discrimination of and social prejudiced against people with disabilities based on the belief that typical abilities are superior. Well, that's not true. I can think of many things that people with hearing loss do much better than those of us with hearing. But we want to talk about specifically ableism and what that looks like with hearing loss. Chelle, can you help us out with some of this?

Chelle: Here's a few examples that I have found, and one of them is younger, people don't have hearing loss. It's all older people. So when I found that, when older, when people come across people with younger, who are younger with hearing loss, that they go, you can't have hearing loss, you're too young. And that's not true, you know, and expecting them to perform as anybody else. So that's, that was one that I found very interesting. And it also expecting certain accommodations to fit everybody. That absolutely is not true. There's a wide variety of us in hearing loss. And we each have our own accommodations, the way we access communication, what we need. So be sure to ask each one of us what we need. And if you're a person with hearing loss, find a way to be very clear about it to combat the "you can use this device" instead of what you really need.

Julia: That's a good thought process. I think in trying to offer accommodations, we accidentally cause ableism. Right. I had a person who was hard of hearing and all they needed was an amplified phone. Well, maybe that is all they need. The next person comes along you don't understand how their- how hearing loss works anyways, you're thinking an amplified phone, why is that not working for you? This, this is what you need. And that's not what you need. It may be more than that. It may be a caption phone, it may be a caption app, it may be CART, one of the biggest ableism I see and have heard of is you can lipread for this eight hour conference. What's the big deal? It's just an eight hour training.

Well,

how do I lipread when you're at your board doing this? Can somebody please lipread me now? Tell me you're not using the captions while I look at my Blackboard. So you know there's no lipreading, when the person isn't always looking at you and you're not in the front row. There's a whole bunch of other things. I find that to be a huge ableism that companies are doing and we need to we need to stand up and say no, that's not okay. It's not appropriate. Maybe you need captions for that meeting. Maybe you need an ASR. I don't know what it looks like. But I would like people to more openly discuss what does your hearing loss look like and what communications do you need? And that starts with you with the hearing loss knowing what you need right. And not to put the onus on you because you could actually work with those around you together to come up with ideas and research. Absolutely can be a team thing. What are your thoughts on that Chelle?

Chelle: The more specific I am with my communication means the better it goes. Also, I am willing to stand up and say, that's not going to work. I can't do it with this accommodation. I need it this way. So people have unrealistic expectations about hearing loss, hearing aids, assistive listening, and all of that. So we have to learn all we can so that we can come combat some of the ableism, like, selective hearing, turn up your hearing aids, clean out your ears. Hmm. huh. I combat all of that, because I've educated myself.

Julia: Yes, we're ones that really believe in communication, education, right. I just want to remind everybody, all of our community, our communication, all of our lipreading classes are built around better communication, not just -- oh, that was quick, five minutes, right. So it may be two seconds longer. All of our classes are built around communication barriers, with lipreading, but they also translate to everyday life. It's why we like hearing partners to also take classes and learn better communication skills. We teach you to be proactive. We teach you what accommodations look like so you know how to find accommodations when you need a technology, stigmatization. We talked about ableism, imposter syndrome, a lot of the stuff that we also talk in our blogs and podcasts. So we hope you'll join us for a class soon. We look forward to getting to know you better. Bye.