effect of the environment on communications for people with hearing loss
The environment in which communications is
attempted has a large impact on the success of communications involving
a person with hearing loss. The environment includes everything related to the physical
area in which a conversation is occurring. The two most important factors are
background noise and lighting.
Background Noise
The overwhelming physical environmental factor is the amount and
characteristics of background noise. Hearing people are sometimes aware that
background noise makes it difficult to understand speech. A loud sporting event
or concert can provide an unwelcome reminder that we just can't hear with all
that noise. A person with a hearing loss who is listening to spoken
communication is in a similar situation to a normally hearing person at concert.
They can see that that someone is talking to them, and they may even be able to
hear some of the sounds, but they just can't make out the words.
How severely background noise degrades a person's ability to understand
speech depends on many complex and related factors, and each person's residual
hearing is different. Most people tend to have high frequency loss, so any high
frequency noise that interferes with the slight amount of high frequency
information they are picking up can really degrade understanding. Hard flat
surfaces tend to reflect high frequency sounds, while soft, irregular tend to
absorb them. For this reason, carpeted rooms, plush furniture, and textured
walls and ceilings tend to improve the ability of many hard of hearing, late
deafened, and oral deaf persons to
understand speech. Conversely, wood floors, bare rooms, and flat walls and
ceilings tend to degrade that ability.
Lighting
Lighting is an important factor for those people who rely partially on speech
reading
to understand spoken communication. EVERYONE relies partially on speech reading
to understand spoken communication. Even normally hearing people understand
better if they can clearly see a speaker's face. How much more important is it
that a person with hearing loss can see well?
The two important lighting factors are the amount of lighting and the
placement of the lighting. The best situation is to have several sources of
light above and in front of the speaker. The goal is to illuminate the speaker
with a soft, uniform light that does not promote shadows.
Of course, you will rarely be in a position to set up an ideal lighting
environment, but you can generally do a lot in almost any situation. Two rules
will go a long way to promote effective communication.
