It can be really hard to know how to succeed when communicating with someone with hearing loss. As someone with hearing loss, I wanted to share some tips and tricks to help make conversations smoother. I also want to share words and behaviors that can be triggering. My hope is that this list can be a good starting point for discussing what does and does not work specifically for the people in your life with hearing loss. No two people with hearing loss have the exact same experience, so please use this as a conversation starter and work to discover what does and does not work for the person with hearing loss in your life.

• Please never say, “Nevermind,” when you are asked to repeat yourself by people with hearing loss. Saying nevermind can make us feel like we aren’t important enough for you to bother repeating yourself.
• Please never try and speak to us from a different room. It just does not work and even if we catch part of it, it typically leads to frustration.
• Please don’t yell. Depending on the hearing loss increased volume may or may not make any difference. Regardless, when you yell you don’t use normal speech rhythms and tones that we rely on to understand what you are saying.
• Please don’t cover your face or mouth. When you cover your mouth it both muffles your voice and hides our view for lip reading. It makes it so much harder to understand you.
• Please try to not get frustrated when you are asked to repeat yourself. We don’t want to ask for the repeat, and often have to work up our courage to even ask. Please be patient repeating yourself. I also recommend rephrasing, as a different word or two may be clearer than the first sentence.
• Please don’t just start talking without notifying us that you are talking to us. Use our name first, make eye contact, or in some other way signal you are trying to interact. My kids are a perfect example of this. They play and chatter all the time. I have to tune them out or my hearing fatigue becomes overwhelming. Suddenly they switch from playing to talking to me and I have no idea until I have already missed half of it.
• Please don’t talk to us when you aren’t facing us. It makes it so much harder to hear when your head is inside the fridge or turned the other way than when you are looking at us.
• Please don’t speak at the same time as someone else. Background noise makes it so much harder to hear. Two people speaking to me at the same time means that I don’t understand either fully.
• Please don’t minimize the impact hearing loss may have in our life. I have had many people tell me that single sided deafness is not a big deal because I still have one ear that works. Maybe for another person it isn’t impactful, but my experience is legitimate.
• Please don’t assume someone does or does not have hearing loss due to age. I literally had a nurse in pre op assume I couldn’t have a hearing aid because I was so young. I had to inform her that she did indeed need to annotate I am wearing a hearing aid.

More resources:

https://www.ucsfhealth.org/education/communicating-with-people-with-hearing-loss