Tips on how to ease communication with someone who is hard of hearing (HoH)

Communicating with hearing people when experiencing hearing loss requires mostly a lot of focus and concentration from the HoH person. If the hearing person wants to support the communication, there are some things to consider. 

Most importantly, when you learn that someone is hard of hearing, don’t start talking ridiculously loudly to them. The effect of talking excessively loudly to a HoH person is the same as for a hearing person. We’ll feel that you’re screaming at us, thus intimidating us, while also drawing negative attention towards the situation if in a public setting. Extreme loudness is rarely helping. What helps is speaking clearly, as it facilitates lipreading - at a bit louder than normal volume. Also talking a bit slower than normally, without reducing the speed to a level that makes us feel you’re talking to a “slow” person helps. Bonus point for the hearing person: people that talk slowly and clearly are perceived as more confident. 

Another important thing would be to face us. We need to see your lips and your face, since we’re very visual people and read a lot from what we see, body language, expressions, tone - they all help us decode and add more meaning to what’s being said. 

Even if you do all the things above, it will definitely happen that we’ll misunderstand a word and ask you to repeat yourself. If you repeated the word once or even twice and we still don’t get it, don’t continue repeating it, but rephrase, use a synonym or say the word with other words and concepts. I’ll give an example. If the word “apple” was misunderstood, instead of “apple” you can say “the round red fruit that grows on trees”, “the most common fruit”, “what we bought from the fruit shop yesterday” or even “the forbidden fruit Eve ate in heaven” or other way you know the person might recognize the word. It’s up to you to judge how much the person would understand, depending on your relationship with them. However, repeating the word louder and clearer for 10 times will not help and with every time you repeat it we feel more helpless. Try to be patient and picture the HoH people like people that are having a worse language level than you. How would you explain the word to someone whose mother tongue is different from yours, when the person doesn't know the word you’re using?

What often gets overlooked is the importance of light. Since we’re visual people we rely on lipreading quite a lot. Being in the dark means not seeing your lips and having to rely only on the acoustics that we have available. Access to sound doesn’t necessarily mean access to language and understanding. This has become very clear to me after getting my cochlear implant. While I hear WAY more than before, including sounds I have forgotten, understanding speech still requires a lot of effort. And lipreading is still a powerful tool that I use. Be aware that in dark spaces the HoH person literally feels “in the dark” regarding communication.

In larger groups, when different people tell different stories or contribute their experiences to the same subject, it happens to me that I cannot follow. It becomes so bad that sometimes I literally don’t know what people are talking about. So I try to find an “appropriate” moment to ask “what are you talking about?”. Responding without judgement by summarizing the subject helps a lot. I don’t always find the courage to ask, so sometimes I let things be and then it happens that I repeat the same thing that someone said before, being unaware it has been said. Again, try to not judge and understand that this happens only because we cannot always follow the discussion. 

Not only light, but also position is important. Try to put the HoH person as central as possible to the source of the communication. This means that when sitting at a table, not in the corner or at the edge, but in the middle. When sitting on a bench, between the people and not at one side. Small round tables or sitting in a circle setting are ideal. However, distance matters as well. I explicitly dislike big round tables, like for example at weddings or galas. I know they were designed to sit many people in a way that they can interact with each other, but because they are big and the distance between speakers facing each other is considerable, I am not able to interact with anyone else (other) than the people to my right and left. Thus, at weddings and galas I mostly dance so that I avoid communicating with people. Or communicating with people verbally. 

Also background noise is a huge challenge, so maybe use your mimics or gestures if you want to communicate something to the hearing person instead of screaming in their ear. We’ll turn the ear away and look at your face because especially in that setting, we mostly lipread. 

Hearing loss is a spectrum and everyone experiences it differently. It’s important to remember that each person has its own experiences and requirements. You can ask them what they need or just observe how they react and notice signs of discomfort or cluelessness. Hope this helps your communication with a HoH person. I know for sure that this helps us significantly. It might require a bit more effort than a “normal” communication, but if you value the HoH person, I promise it’s totally worth it. 

So, to sum up, here’s what to remember:

• Talk at a normal, not low volume

• Speak clearly, as it facilitates lipreading

• Face the person, as it facilitates lipreading

• Use your hands, body language and mimics to enrich communication

• Don’t endlessly repeat a misunderstood word, but rephrase 

• Avoid communicating with a HoH person in a dark environment (you guessed, it’s because it hinders lipreading)

• Avoid tedious conversations in places with loud background noise

• Remember that the distance of communication also matters, the further away, the more likely we’ll miss what you’re saying

• Place the HoH person as close to the source of sound/communication as possible (e.g. seated around the middle of a table and not at the edge)

• When a HoH person cannot follow a discussion and asks to be clued in on the topic, summarize the subject without judgement

• Don’t get awkward if the HoH person repeats what someone else mentioned earlier in the communication - they didn’t hear/catch it 

• Be kind and patient, we’re struggling more than you are