Story by Leanne Stahulak
Photography by Aspen Stein
For 22-year-old Christina Martin, masking up to go to the grocery store or a restaurant means she has to leave an important piece of herself at home. It means she always has to bring someone with her so that they can help her communicate with others. It means she has to find yet another way to navigate the world with her hearing loss.
Martin discovered her mild, unilateral sensorineural hearing loss at the age of 14, which today requires her to wear a hearing aid in her right ear. She says that she's become so used to wearing the hearing aid that she'll forget it's even in her ear. Until her mask strap gets caught in it, and she accidentally yanks the whole hearing aid out when removing her mask.
But with experts strongly encouraging wearing masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Martin and several others in the deaf or hard of hearing community have to decide whether effective communication is worth the risk.
“Communicating with the masks is very hard,” Martin said.
Martin explained how different accents already create difficulties with her particular hearing loss, but adding a mask that muffles voices makes it nearly impossible to determine what people are saying. When she visited a Japanese restaurant in August, Martin remembers relying on her friend to relay the information presented by the servers.
“It felt like I was really hurting the waitress’ [feelings] … like she didn't know [about my hearing loss] so I'm just sitting here thinking, ‘I’m sorry, I can't understand you,’” Martin said. “I’ve never felt like I couldn't hear anybody [at all] before.”
Anne M. Hutchinson, a Miami student with profound hearing loss, agreed that adjusting to masks is one of the more challenging parts of being hard of hearing in the pandemic. Like Martin, she commonly chooses not to wear her hearing aid out in public, and muffled sounds only increase her difficulties with hearing.
“It’s not optimal in terms of distancing, either,” Hutchinson said. “Sometimes I'll walk closer than the six feet toward whoever I'm talking to without thinking about it, whether they realize I can’t hear or not.”
Director of the Miller Center for Student Disability Services (SDS) Stephanie Dawson says that masks also cut off important visual cues that several deaf people on campus rely on.
“Some of the primary issues we see are that facial coverings are opaque, and they really obstruct the full view of the face and the lips,” Dawson said. “Lip reading involves view of the lips, but communication also involves facial expressions.”
Martin doesn’t use American Sign Language (ASL) often, but she knows that smiling, raised or lowered eyebrows and other facial movements are an intrinsic part of the language. When half of the face is covered, only half of the conversation can be conveyed.
“It's more difficult to gauge somebody’s expression because you just have the eyes, and those don’t alway tell the story,” Martin said.
Dawson and SDS consulted the National Deaf Center for recommendations on the best ways to help people who are hard of hearing communicate during the pandemic. The top result: completely clear face masks.
These transparent plastic masks fit snugly to the wearer’s face without fogging up. SDS ordered hundreds of these masks to supply to professors and potential group members in Miami classes that contain a hard of hearing student.
Dawson emphasized how these masks create ease of communication for everybody, eliminating “barriers” between faculty and students. SDS’s goal is to balance both safety and accessibility for the 37 hard of hearing students enrolled at Miami.
“It may seem like that’s not that many students in the larger scheme of [20,0000] students, but that’s 37 students who deserve a quality and accessible Miami experience,” Dawson said. “It also translates to 193 courses that are going to need to be accessible, where we need 193 faculty who really understand how important it is that our students don't experience communication barriers, because ultimately that’s a barrier to their education, which is the barrier to their ability to live life fully.”
Now that classes have resumed in-person, Dawson and the SDS must work even harder to ensure those barriers are eliminated. While the clear masks are a start, SDS will sit down with all of the professors who have a hard of hearing student in class to talk about communication procedures.
Cindy Steidle, the coordinator and provider for the Communication Access Real-Time Translation (CART) program, is in charge of conducting these “pre-term” consultations. She’s already got some advice for professors conducting in-person classes.
“Speak to your audience, speak to be heard. Faster isn't necessarily better. Keep in mind, when you turn your back that's harder for everybody...and that the mask is going to muffle your voice,” Steidle said. “Everybody needs to have good communication skills, and what would be helpful on [professors'] parts is to repeat or rephrase any questions or comments by the class.”
Steidle met with professors when Miami decided to begin the fall semester remotely. She helped them set up third-party captioning services on Zoom calls or recorded lectures, and said that more deaf students have requested captioning services than ever before. She can’t say whether online classes have been conclusively helpful or harmful to hard of hearing students; it depends on a case by case basis.
In Hutchinson’s case, online classes have been a huge plus both for her emotional state and in terms of her ability to hear better. Hutchinson said she usually wears an amplifying device around her neck or a large headset during classes, in addition to her hearing aid.
She’s felt singled out in large in-person classes for her assistive technology, feeling the cruelty of the stigma associated with the deaf community as people draw attention to her equipment. But now that everyone’s on Zoom, she’s not the only one wearing headsets or other devices.
And in terms of hearing better, having the breakout function on Zoom has allowed her to fully participate in small group discussions. Back when she was taking in person classes, the cacophony of noise could be overwhelming.
“I can't hear in a small group because there’s all this background noise—that was my worst enemy in a traditional classroom,” Hutchinson said. “The professors are like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna break into small groups,’ and inside I'm thinking, ‘Oh my god, I'm not gonna hear a darn thing.’ I really miss the live classroom, but it's just an unexpected benefit that I often hear better than I did before. And I feel less visible with the technology that helps me learn.”
Martin agrees that online classes have their benefits. Being in a set routine and working out a good system with her captionist have helped Martin adjust better to remote learning, but she still can’t ignore the difficulties she encountered before March that have only been amplified by the pandemic and necessity of wearing masks.
“Before, I never had to ask people to repeat themselves as much, but now I feel like I have to ask all the time,” Martin said. “And when you're someone who already has to ask somebody to repeat themselves, usually one time’s enough. But repeating more than once, people can get very agitated. And that's usually when people make fun of people with hearing loss.”
Martin stressed the importance of patience and understanding during this time.
Her sentiments were echoed by Dawson, who emphasized how inaccessibility during the pandemic creates a higher risk of marginalization for a group that is already pushed to the sidelines. Being forced to choose “between communicating and protecting themselves,” Dawson says, only creates “additional social problems.”
But hard of hearing members like Martin and Hutchinson don't like to focus on “problems” or “obstacles.” Hutchinson emphasized how she’s “trying to live life as fully as possible within the limitations that exist.”
Dawson agrees that these limitations inspire deaf people to push forward with the help of SDS.
“What we’re seeing is that students just really want to be resilient,” Dawson said. “They’re still committed to their education, and they want to press forward under the new conditions, and they seem to have confidence that we are all going to come together as one Mimai community to make things a good experience.”
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