Biderman: Hear me out — life is getting better

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It’s become fashionable in these fraught times to say that things are getting worse. In every way. But for me, as someone who grew up deaf (and lip-reading), I know it’s the reverse: things have been getting better.

My hearing loss progressed to a profound level (meaning I could not hear on the phone, could not understand speech without lip-reading) by the time I was 12. At that point, I began wearing a hearing aid. My first one consisted of an old-lady pink button protruding from my ear, a plastic “custom-fitted” ear mould and a pink cable snaking down my neck to a small cigarette-package-sized processor I wore first in my undershirt, then in my bra — where it later caused bone spurs. The ear mould chafed and hurt, and caused sores in my ear. The cable snaking down my neck yanked at my head every time I turned it.

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Today, I have no mould in my ear, no cable running down my neck, no processor giving me bone spurs. Instead I hear with two light-weight mini digital devices that sit comfortably over my ears and communicate with internally implanted receivers. I hear with cochlear implants. And I hear far, far better than I ever did.

In fact, I no longer have any biological hearing: I am a bionic woman.

I no longer rely on others to explain the plots of movies or the punch lines of jokes. Thanks to the oddly named “Bluetooth” technology on both my hearing devices and my cellphone, I now have not only phone conversations streamed directly into my inner ear, but also music, podcasts and news. I no longer need to ask others to make phone calls for me.

On television, I can turn on captions and follow the most difficult of dialogues — even those with thick Yorkshire accents. On YouTube and on podcasts as well, I can turn on captioning, or read the full transcript of a talk.

During the height of the pandemic, and even today, when people (for example, doctors) talk to me with their faces covered by masks, if I have trouble understanding them, I can follow what they are saying by using an “app” on my cellphone. That app rapidly and quite accurately translates speech to text that displays on my cellphone screen. Speech-to-text software on desktop computers used to be enormously expensive, slow and prone to errors. Today, my excellent speech-to text software is free, on the cellphone I throw in my purse.

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This same app can give me a running transcription of any difficult phone call if I need it. Call centres in India, I’m looking at you.

By now, just about everyone with a computer has discovered Zoom, but for deaf people especially, it has been a dream come true. Not only can we see the face of the “caller” to lip-read, but we even have free captioning on the screen. When I was a teenager and my mother (yes, you read that right) took phone calls from boys asking me out on dates, I could only dream of a phone that would show the caller’s face so I could lip-read them and take my own calls.

In noisy restaurants, where my hearing friends struggle to hear over the din, with a tap on my cellphone I can turn off my devices’ microphones that would normally pick up conversations behind me. Instead I can focus the microphones only on the person speaking in front of me. Hearing people are justifiably envious.

However, when I book a flight and indicate that I am deaf (for I still am), I’m often greeted at the airport with a wheelchair. Evidently, there is still room for improvement in society’s response to disabilities, still room for nuance. But I’m grateful for how much things have gotten better for me as a deaf person, and I look forward to it getting even better.

Writer Beverly Biderman is a past chair of the board for the Canadian Hearing Society, and the author of Wired for Sound: A Journey into Hearing.

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