Tips for the Person with Hearing Loss
If you're a person with a hearing loss
communicating with a hearing person, please be mindful of the following
tips:
1. Pick an appropriate place to communicate. Someplace
with good lighting, little background noise, and few distractions is
good.
2. Anticipate difficult situations and enter them with
an appropriate strategy. This includes things like trying to anticipate
what terms might be used, what questions you might be asked, how to
improve the environment. Be proactive and set things up for
communications to succeed.
3. Tell the hearing person how she can best communicate
with you. She will probably appreciate it.
4. Ask for rephrasing and written key words if you're
not understanding.
5. If you don't understand something, be as specific as
you can be in explaining what you missed. Say something like, "I
understood everything up to the name of the street."
6. Try to arrange breaks if the conversation or meeting
is a long one.
7. If you discover that you've said something that
doesn't fit the conversation (and you will), use humor to make everyone
(including yourself) feel at ease. This doesn't mean that you should
make fun of yourself, but that you recognize that the situation is
amusing.
8. Don't monopolize the conversation. That's boring for
everyone.
9. If it's just not working, arrange to try again when
the probability of success is better, perhaps in a better environment or
when you're less tired.
10. Do not bluff! If the conversation is important
enough for you to participate, it's important enough for everyone to
know that communication happened!
