| Interesting article. Thanks for posting, varunsrin! I've been following development of SoundFocus for awhile. I'm profoundly deaf. This is a technical term classifying the degree of hearing loss; to give you a sense of where this fits, the typical classification range is mild, moderate, severe, profound, total. Between a combination of hearing aids and lip-reading, I've done a reasonable job of integrating into a hearing society. Not perfect, but ok. I've often wished for a different approach to correcting hearing. It crystallized for me after I read this article by Jon Udell: http://blog.jonudell.net/2014/12/09/why-shouting-wont-help-y... In that article, what Jon found was that his mom would hear best if you spoke at a low to medium volume close to her ear - this worked better than any shouting at a greater distance could accomplish. And it should be easy for you to simulate - get a friend to talk to you from 50' away - you can still hear them, but there's some detail loss that wouldn't happen if they're 3' away. I still benefit - a lot - from MBC, but if someone could come up with a way to make the incoming sound sound as if it were right beside me, man, that would really help me understand people clearly. One non-technical solution, that people use to ensure that deaf people can understand you clearly is to enunciate consonants audibly. An example of this is is the word "red" - it becomes "erREDdead". I don't know if there's a name for this so I can't point you to a page describing how to extra-enunciate all the letters. As useful as it is, people speaking to me like that always makes me feel like I'm dumb, because they sound dumb saying it. Clearly I have issues :-) |
But if it helps you hear, I think it's great!
That article you linked to was interesting. Thanks.