Coping

It’s About Time: Entire 2011 Super Bowl Broadcast AND All Its Advertisements Will Have Closed Captioning

After years of intense lobbying by the entire hard-of-hearing community, the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) has gotten a commitment from the National Football League (NFL) and FOX Broadcasting to provide closed captions for the entire Super Bowl XLV broadcast this Sunday—including all advertisements that will be aired.

Everyone knows the Super Bowl is more than a football game. In fact, in the Madison Avenue circles where I used to move, it’s more a Super Bowl of advertising than an athletic contest. It’s where the most creative minds in media and entertainment show off their best and brightest ideas every year. That’s why when I lost most of my hearing, it enraged me that so few of the ads had captions. Read more

Competition Among Captioned Telephone Services Heats Up With New ClearCaptions Service From Purple Communications

Purple Communications, which has been providing voice and video relay services and other assistance to deaf and hard-of-hearing consumers for over a decade, is broadening its portfolio with its new ClearCaptions IP closed captioned telephone service. Captioning of real-time telephone conversations over the Internet is currently available from two other vendors, Sprint Relay and Hamilton Relay, both of whom rely on the WebCaptel service developed by UltraTec. Purple Communications (formerly GoAmerica), which will offer the service under its FCC charter as an approved provider of Telecommunications Relay Services (TRS), is creating some competition and increasing awareness of telephone captioning with its entirely new ClearCaptions service.

ClearCaptions is currently in its beta-test or trial phase but is accepting new users who can register at the ClearCaptions web site. IP captioned telephone service lets you view real-time captions of your phone conversations on your Internet-connected computer (or your Internet-connected handheld phone or tablet). All you have to do is notify your relay service provider that you are making a call, and the service provider monitors both ends of the conversation and, aided by voice-recognition software, provides you with a real-time transcript of the call. That way, if you’re like me and tend to miss anywhere from 20 to 80 percent of a phone conversation depending on the quality of the connection and any background noise that might be present, you get to fill in the blanks with the transcript. Read more

ReSound Donates Hearing Aids To Help America Hear Program

If you can’t afford hearing aids but need them, you may still be able to get them if you qualify. The Foundation for Sight & Sound is partnering with leading hearing-aid manufacturer ReSound to beef up its Help America Hear Program to provide more free hearing aids and proper hearing-aid fittings to people who can’t afford them. ReSound, the exclusive supplier of hearing aids to the program, has donated hundreds of pairs of hearing aids for people who meet financial eligibility requirements after applying on the Help America Hear web site.

The hearing aid industry manufacturers often define their work as a social mission to improve people’s lives by improving their ability to socialize and communicate. But it’s often hard to reconcile the claim that they are on a social mission when so many of their products are priced so high that only the very wealthiest of world’s consumers can afford them. Their social credibility would be higher if more manufacturers put their money where their mouth is by making a real effort to give something back, like ReSound and another notable example, Starkey Laboratories. Starkey Labs founder William Austen, whose Starkey Hearing Foundation has led the way for many years by raising millions of dollars to fund the donation of of hearing aids to tens of thousand of people around the world, says his foundation gives away 100,000 hearing aids a year, compared to the 1 million hearing aids sold annually by Starkey Labs: “It’s 10 percent, so it’s like tithing,” he told the Clark, County, WA, Columbian in an interview last Fall.

And the opportunity to give back doesn’t end with the manufacturers. There are millions of hearing aids sitting unused in bureau drawers around the world. Many of them could be reconditioned and provide a needy person with the gift of hearing. If you have a pair gathering dust in your drawer, you can donate them to Starkey’s Hear Now program. Another hearing aid manufacturer, America Hears, in the past has offered discounts to consumers who trade in their hearing aids and donates the used aids to a Rotary International Foundation program, Help the Children Hear.

How Much Government Regulation Should There Be Of Noise And Hearing Loss In The Workplace?

Manufacturers of personal hearing protection solutions are missing an opportunity by not raising their voices to be heard in the debate over government regulations limiting noise in the workplace. When two U.S. Senators this week persuaded the U.S. Labor Department to back off from proposed rule changes that would have required large and small companies to more aggressively manage noise levels in the workplace, they put their finger on a critical question: Should the government force companies to limit the overall noise they create, or should government instead simply require companies to provide their employees with effective personal hearing protection?

When the government tells manufacturers to lower overall workplace noise volume, it forces businesses to install expensive sound-dampening systems that can amount to huge capital investments. But when the government simply tells businesses to protect the hearing of their workers in the most effective way possible, the first move is to outfit workers with highly effective (and highly cost-effective) ear plugs, ear muffs, or more sophisticated hearing protection devices that allow them to communicate even as their hearing is protected from over-loud noise.

Unfortunately, government bureaucrats often are more interested in fast but expensive one-size-fits-all solutions than they are in getting up to speed on things like the variety of new personal hearing protection technologies that can do the job better and less expensively. Therefore, if makers of personal hearing protection devices want to increase their market and sales, they should be advocating for sensible hearing-protection rules that require companies to issue the right kind of hearing protection equipment to their employees, over rules that require more expensive investments in overall workplace noise reduction. Read more

Hamilton CapTel Offers 800i Captioned Telephone With Free TV Ears Thrown In For Only $99

Want to save $600 and get two of the hottest assistive listening devices (ALDs) available? Hamilton Relay’s Hamilton CapTel business unit is making a limited-time offer for its CapTel 800i captioned telephone, bundled with a TV Ears system, for only $99 combined. Hamilton CapTel has been special-offering its $595-list-price 800i captioned telephone system for $99 for a while, and now it is throwing in the highly popular wireless television amplifier from TV Ears for free.

All you have to do is go to the HamiltonCaptel web site’s special-offer landing page, grab the coupon/promo code, click through to distributor Weitbrecht Communications’ (WCI) fulfillment page, put the 800i in your shopping cart, then make sure to enter the coupon code in the “Redeem a discount coupon” space on the shopping cart page — the TV Ears product, which usually retails for $99.95, will appear as a second item in your basket with a discounted price of $0. It takes a few steps, and I don’t know how long the special offer will be available, but if you or anyone you know would benefit from either or both products, it’s a great deal.

Hamilton CapTel and TV Ears got together at the Consumer Electronics Show, where TV Ears returned the compliment by announcing it will bundle the 800i phone with the TV Ears system and a variety of personal sound amplifer products (PSAPs) and entry-level hearing aids. (More on that announcement later). The two companies make a welcome fit for hard-of-hearing consumers looking for cost-effective help with their hearing. TV Ears serves the huge market of people with mild hearing loss, positioning their easy-to-use TV-amplification headset as a “gateway” for those who might later migrate to more powerful assistive listening devices and/or hearing aids.

Hamilton CapTel has been a leader in delivering captioned telephone solutions to consumers, and the 800i is a great product for anyone who has trouble understanding phone conversations. The 800i plugs into a standard Internet connection, which enables you to initiate a free WebCapTel call, and the unit’s LCD displays lets a real-time transcript of the words of the person on the other end of the call while you conduct a regular conversation with the handset over a normal phone line. While Hamilton CapTel usually serves customers with more severe hearing loss, while TV Ears is for people with mild hearing loss, you can envision the same person using both. The 800i product makes the WebCapTel service easy to use, so that people with moderate hearing loss who only have occasional problems with the phone are more likely to use it; and the TV Ears product has enough of a volume boost to be of help even for many regular hearing-aid users with moderate hearing loss.

I plan on trialing both products and will let you know how they work.

Doing Well By Doing Good: Etymotic Research Wins CES Award For High-Tech Ear Plugs Protecting Soldiers’ Hearing In War Zones

Serious hearing loss is an all-too-common problem besetting U.S. military veterans and is the number-one cause of disability among those soldiers returning from Afghanistan. The problem is all the more tragic because for the most part hearing loss is preventable: a simple, inexpensive set of good earplugs can protect your hearing from the damage caused by even explosions and gunshot blasts. Unfortunately, many of the earplugs available to soldiers today frequently suffer the same fate as hearing aids worn by the rest of us: too often they sit in the drawer, unused. That’s not because soldiers are vain or lazy. The sad truth is that traditional ear plugs are unsafe in combat zones. When you can’t hear your colleagues in a firefight, chain-of-command breaks down pretty quickly, and people can get killed.

What’s needed is intelligent, active hearing protection. A new class of hearing-aid-like devices can dampen too-loud noise and filter out unwanted noise while amplifying and clarifying speech. A number of hearing-technology companies have tackled the challenge of hearing protection for soldiers, and one of them, Etymotic Research, just won a “Best of Innovations” award at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Etymotic’s Electronic Blast PLG Earplugs won a coveted Best of Innovations in Health and Wellness award at a ceremony yesterday. The Etymotic blast earplugs allow normal detection and localization of even the softest sounds, provide optional gain for (only) soft sound, and protect ears from firearms and explosive blast. And they’re not just for soldiers, as hunters and workers in noisy industrial environments can find them equally useful.

No Tinnitus Cure In Sight, But Plenty Of Therapies Make Ringing In The Ears Easier To Live With

Tinnitus–unnatural ringing, buzzing, hissing, humming and other unwanted sounds in your ear–can literally drive you crazy if you let it. Researchers have studied the phenomenon for years, and while there are range of theories about its causes, a good layman’s explanation is that when your hearing and auditory nerves suffer damage or degradation, the brain tries to make up for the lack of usual sounds by creating its own. Unfortunately there is no known conclusive cure. But as The Wall Street Journal recently reported, numerous therapies have been developed in recent years that can help you live with even a severe case of tinnitus.

My tinnitus crept up on me gradually, starting in my twenties, but when I suffered severe sudden hearing loss a few years ago, it came on like gangbusters. When I’m by myself in a quiet room, there’s a cacophony of noises in my head, including the weird phenomenon of phantom music. The good news is that when I’m wearing my hearing aids while I’m out and about interacting with people in the world, I barely notice my tinnitus. The real-world sounds seem to both mask the bothersome noises in my head and, just as important, distract my attention from them.

These two effects — masking and distraction — are the first steps in many of the most effective therapies. Tinnitus sound-masking devices simply create soothing music or white noise that blends with or overrides the tinnitus sounds. They can come in hearing-aid-like devices, ear-buds with hand-held units similar to MP3 players. They can also come in hearing aids themselves: Widex has incorporated its Zen sound-generating program into its flagship mind330 and mind220 series of hearing aids. The Zen program uses soothing music to fill in quiet periods and distract hearing-aid users from their tinnitus. Read more

U.S. Senate Passes Twenty-First Century Communications And Video Accessibility Act Of 2010 By Unanimous Consent

The U.S. Senate passed the 21st Century Communications and video Accessibility Act (S. 3304) by unanimous consent, virtually assuring that the disability rights act guaranteeing access by deaf, hard-of-hearing, blind and vision-impaired consumers to all forms of media will become law.

Passage was expected after the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved its version of the same bill, H.R. 3101, last week, and now all that is required is reconciliation of the two bills, a final vote in the House and President Obama’s signature. In what House sponsor Rep. Edward Markey has called “online ramps to the Internet” for people with disabilities, the new law will, among many other things:

• Require captioned television programs to be captioned when delivered over the Internet.
• Authorize the FCC to require 7 hours per week of TV video description for vision-impaired people on the top 4 network channels and top 5 cable channels nationwide.
• Allocate up to $10 million per year for communications equipment used by individuals who are deaf-blind.
• Require devices of any size to be capable of displaying closed captioning, delivering available video description, and making emergency information accessible.
• Require accessible user controls for televisions and set-top boxes, and easy access to closed captioning and video description.

The new law is a huge step forward for people with disabilities in an age when equal access to Internet services is an absolute must for anyone to successfully earn a living and enjoy the quality of life that other accommodations have enabled ever since passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) 20 years ago.

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