Challenges listening on the telephone

One of my many challenges of being a hearing impaired person is actually trying to hear on a telephone. Growing up I was fortunate enough to get an amplified telephone so that I could hear well enough on the house phone. This of course didn't do me much good when when I went to a friends house or tried to use a phone booth. Phone booths were supposed to have increased volume but most of them I tried out really didn't seem to have the feature set up correctly plus they didn't appear to be compatible to my hearing aid when I switch them to phone mode.

I tried using an adapter that went over the handset in order to increase the volume on other phones but that didn't seem to work that well.

I started to really run into problems when I started working since the phones at work were tied into large PBX phone systems and of course they weren't compatible with my hearing aid since they didn't have the t-coil in them. At one job I tried explaining the difficulties I was having on the phone and how my co-workers kept pressuring me to answer the phone but the office manager wasn't any help. I showed her a catalog of phones that were specially designed for hearing impaired folks that could probably be compatible with their phone system but they weren't interested in looking at them. I guess they really weren't concerned with the requirements of the American Disabilities Act. I ended up not sticking around the job because it was clear between co-workers and the office manager that they didn't have any compassion for my challenges and in fact they acted as if I was using it as a crutch. I think one of reasons I have that issue is the fact that I speak very well for a hearing impaired person but that's mainly due to how much speech therapy I've gone through. The fact that I had to quit actually traumatized me a bit and made me feel that I couldn't make it in the work environment and really lowered my self esteem.

At home my amplified phone finally gave out after many years of use. I went to the local community deaf and hard of hearing center and they helped me apply for a voucher to get a new phone. Once I got the voucher I was able to get a new phone that actually had closed caption on it. Wow! A phone with closed captioning? Sounded like a great idea but unfortunately some of my calls are in Spanish and the phone was unable to translate Spanish speaking into closed captioning and would just report that the caller was speaking a foreign language. I ended up giving up on the phone because honestly it was not amplified enough compared to my original phone. I also strangely had really large buttons as if I was more visually impaired that hearing impaired



I won't even get started yet on cell phones as that is entirely a whole new story perhaps I will share that next time.