Contemporary cell phones have become a lot clearer and more dependable nowadays. But that doesn’t mean everyone can hear you all the time. And for people who have hearing loss, it can be particularly challenging.
Now, you might be thinking: there’s an easy remedy for that, right? Can’t you make use of some hearing aids to help you understand phone conversations more clearly? Well, that’s not… exactly… how it works. It turns out that, while hearing aids can make face-to-face conversations a great deal easier to handle, there are some challenges related to phone-based conversations. But there are certainly a few things you can do to make your phone calls more effective.
Why phone calls and hearing aids don’t always play nice
Hearing loss generally isn’t immediate. Your hearing usually doesn’t just go. You have a tendency to lose bits and pieces at a time. It’s likely that you won’t even detect you have hearing loss and your brain will attempt to utilize contextual and visual clues to compensate.
When you have phone conversations, you no longer have these visual hints. There’s no added information for your brain to work with. You only hear parts and pieces of the other person’s voice which sounds muffled and distorted.
How hearing aids can help
This can be improved by using hearing aids. They’ll particularly help your ears fill in a lot of those missing pieces. But there are a few unique accessibility and communication challenges that happen from wearing hearing aids while talking on the phone.
For instance, putting your hearing aids near a phone speaker can produce some harsh speaker-to-speaker interference. This can make things difficult to hear and uncomfortable.
Improving your ability to hear phone conversations
So what measures can be taken to help make your hearing aids work better with a phone? Well, there are several tips that the majority of hearing specialists will endorse:
- Be sincere with the individual you’re speaking with on the phone: If phone calls are hard for you, it’s okay to admit that! Many people will be just fine transferring the discussion to text message or email or video calls (or simply being a little extra patient).
- Find a quiet location to conduct your phone conversations. It will be much easier to hear the voice on the other end if there’s less background sound. Your hearing aids will be much more efficient by decreasing background noise.
- Stream your phone to your hearing aid using Bluetooth. Hold on, can hearing aids stream to smartphones? Yes, they can! This means that if your hearing aids are Bluetooth enabled, phone calls can be streamed straight to your phone. This can eliminate feedback and make your phone calls a bit more private, so it’s a good place to begin if you’re having difficulty on your phone.
- Put your phone in speaker mode as often as possible: This will counter the most serious feedback. Your phone conversations may not be particularly private, but even though there still might be some distortion, you should be able to better make out the voice on the other end. The best way to keep your phone and your hearing aid apart is by switching to speakerphone.
- Utilize video apps: Face-timing someone or jumping onto a video chat can be a very good way to help you hear better. It’s not that the sound quality is magically better, it’s that your brain has access to all of that amazing visual information again. And once more, this type of contextual information will be substantially helpful.
- Hearing aids aren’t the only assistive hearing device you can get: There are other assistive devices and services that can help you hear better when you’re having a phone conversation (including many text-to-type services).
Depending on your general hearing needs, how often you use the phone, and what you use your phone for, the appropriate set of solutions will be available. With the correct approach, you’ll have the resources you need to begin enjoying those phone conversations again.
Call us for some help and advice on how to best use your phone and hearing aids together.
