hard of hearing – Open Ears Archive

Captioning on YouTube has been a hot topic in the deaf/Hard of Hearing world lately, especially among teenagers.

YouTuber Rikki Poynter – Pikachu lover and advocate for closed captioning, who’s also deaf – has sort of led the charge for getting all YouTube videos captioned. She explains in her video why captioning is important for Deaf/HOH people, as well as those who don’t speak the language that the video is filmed in. She also posts a whole load about deaf related topics.

Captions on YouTube has been such an important topic lately, mostly because they are so bad. In 2009, YouTube released their automatic captioning feature for videos using voice recognition algorithm, but the text is often inaccurate. While YouTube does let users upload their own captions, it can be time consuming, and most users don’t do it.

However, with encouragement from the Deaf/Hard of Hearing community, and people like Rikki, there are some YouTubers who are leading this change.

Here’s a list of some YouTubers I’ve found who caption their videos: Continue reading “My favorite YouTubers (who caption!)”

“Deaf,” “deaf,” “hard of hearing,” “hearing impaired”…

There are many words that describe someone with hearing loss. Some of them are used to describe how much you can hear, others elicit positive feelings, and other more negative. Other terms are viewed as politically correct, while unfortunately in some places it’s still common to use words like “deaf and dumb.”

Thankfully, we’ve come a long way from terms that belittle people with hearing loss, but there are still situations that we run into that make us think, wow, we still have a long way to go.

So, what do you think? How do you describe hearing loss to your friends, family or people you aren’t that close with? Does it matter?

“The idea behind “hearing impaired” is that we are lesser human beings and must be fixed to function.

Those who suffer (dare I use “suffer”?) from mild to moderate hearing loss do not necessarily identify with the term deaf—a word that is historically loaded and also carries a distinction between capitalized and lowercase “d”. Uppercase “Deaf” reflects a community and a culture of identity, and carries pride similar to that of ethnic and religious groups. Lowercase “deaf” can reflect only severe to profound hearing loss, or hearing loss on the whole, depending who you ask.” – Christina The Name I Call Myself

Join the discussion about this topic in the comments section, or on the Hearing Like Me forum!

Continue reading “The Minefield of Hearing-Related Terminology”