People who are hard of hearing are just as intelligent and they can communicate just as well as hearing people. It all depends on hearing people’s willingness and ability to learn how to communicate effectively with them.

Useful tips when communicating with people who are hard of hearing

    • Make sure that your speech is loud enough, but do not shout. Shouting always comes across as aggressive. The correct technique is to project your voice instead of shouting.
    • Separate your words to make them seem clearer. However, this does not mean that you have to speaking slowly at all.
    • When having a conversation with a person with hearing loss, it is best to sit around a table rather than on easy chairs, because that way the separation between people is less.
    • Wait for a quiet environment before trying to converse. People with normal hearing automatically “filters out” everyday noises such as traffic or the radio but someone with hearing loss cannot do this and therefore finds it hard to concentrate on the conversation.
    • Get the attention a person who is hard of hearing first before launching into a conversation. You can smile or gesture, or go over to the person and touch him or her on the shoulder before starting to speak.
    • Sometimes people with hearing loss have difficulty in hearing or recognising a particular word. Try to put your message across in another way, for example by rephrasing or using a description rather than the original word.
    • Never introduce a new topic in the conversation while another is still being discussed.
    • Never make joking asides. Although normal hearers may not realise it, these always seem to be made in stage whispers. Everyone except the person with hearing loss hears them, everyone laughs at the joke and the hard of hearing person has no idea why! Can you imagine how this must feel?
    • If you have a regional accent that the person with hearing loss may be unfamiliar with, let him or her get used to it before you say anything of any significance.
    • When a person who is hard of hearing doesn’t hear you, move nearer or speak more clearly and either repeat what you said or smile and say something like, “I was only really talking to myself”. Don’t say, “It doesn’t matter”. This is interpreted as “You don’t matter enough for me to bother to try to make you understand”.
    • Make sure that some light falls upon your face as many people who are hard of hearing depend to a large extent on lip reading to help them “hear” what is being said.
    • Make sure that the younger generation understands the needs of a particular deaf or hard of hearing person. Many older people have hearing loss and the people they probably care about most in the world are their grandchildren. Yet children have high-pitched voices, they use new words that older people perhaps wouldn’t understand anyway (even if they could hear them) and they dart around changing their positions. It’s up to you to show and teach them how to talk to people who are hard of hearing.

 

Sources

Communicating with people with hearing loss. Retrieved from https://www.ucsfhealth.org/education/communicating_with_people_with_hearing_loss/
Tips to improve communication when talking with someone with hearing loss. Retrieved from http://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases_conditions/hic_Hearing_Loss_Communication_Strategies_for_Family_and_Friends/hic-tips-improve-communication-when-talking-someone-hearing-loss

 

(Revised by M van Deventer)