Hearing Loss LIVE! in Five: Tokenism

#Tokenism is a concern to those of us with #HearingLoss. What is tokenism? It's a symbolic effort to be inclusive. Listen to our examples here and then go to our blog for another example.  https://hearinglosslive.com/hearing-loss-technology-improvements/

Find a transcript of this podcast on our BuzzSprout site:
https://hearinglosslivepodcast.buzzsprout.com/

Transcript

Welcome to Hearing Loss LIVE! in Five.

Julia: Hello and welcome to Hearing Loss LIVE! in Five. We hope you are remembering to like, subscribe and share our material. Check out our new workbooks on our website, hearinglosslive.com. We have classes that are recorded for purchase right now. We will have live on Google meet classes starting this fall. So we hope you keep an eye out, join our newsletter and find out more on what we're up to this summer. Recently, Chelle wrote a wonderful blog around tokenism. In this five minute short, Chelle's going to talk to us a little bit about what that looks like with hearing loss. Hopefully you'll go back and read the blog and listen and/or watch this podcast. Chelle talk to us about tokenism and hearing loss.

Chelle: Tokenism is a symbolic effort only to accommodate cultures and disabilities. It's to me, it's show and tell. Ah, look, I have this wonderful system right here. This is a great system, but I forgot to charge it. None of my employees know how to find it, and they don't charge it, or it's set to the wrong room, or something like that. Turn it on, it doesn't work. It's just there for show and tell. That's checking the box. And I've recently learned in the UK, they call it ticking the box. So yeah, you've marked the box for Americans with Disabilities Act, accommodations. Ah, I have it. But do you really? And are you being inclusive? Are you training employees? Are you updating equipment as needed, or a whole system? Sometimes we need to do that. There's a lot of good assistive listening systems out there now. Tokenism can also apply to captions. Here you go. You have automatic speech recognition captions. So there it is. You got it. And even though the important, the information is important, if it goes off kilter, that's okay. You got captions. And when the information is important, you need to have the correct accommodation. No matter if it's captions, assistive listening, be, to be fully inclusive, you have to do more than check the box.

Julia: Wow. Lot of tokenism out there, isn't it? Boy, I think we touch on it in almost everything we talk about for the last three years, to be honest and and I, I'm actually glad we called it what it is, right? I think people need to be more realistic and honest with don't just check the boxes. Make sure it's being done appropriately. One size doesn't fit all. Just because you have an assistive listening device doesn't mean I, with my profound hearing loss am going to be able to use it. Oh, boy. I don't even know where to go, because I see it every day. You ask, for services, but the setup is not set up to handle the service. You're not using the overhead projector because only one person asked for the captions or I don't know, I just I see it in a lot of different ways, hmm, I have to think about that some more, Chelle, sorry.

Julia: It reminds me of an instance I don't know, a year ago, when I asked for assistive listening and they dumped like five different systems in front of me. They had their heart in the right place, but they don't have any knowledge of it, nor were they checking with people who really have the knowledge. And I think all of them, I was like, they're they're not going to work because of the setting. And this is what this one's for, and this is what has to happen for this one to, to work. And they some tech people feel like they are, the knowledgeable one about assistive listening and and I'm standing there going, no, no. But nobody wants to believe me, because they're the tech person. And this is why it's so important to involve somebody in the hard of hearing community when purchasing devices to explain how it works. Maybe not all of us will know that, but some of us do.

Julia: Yes, I like that. Involve the community. See what their needs are, sit down. Maybe it's multiple things, and it's okay to have multiple things. Involve the captioner, involve the interpreting team, involve those involved in giving out the services, and you will decrease that tokenism. In my opinion, I am glad you joined us. Make sure you check us out and

Bye!