Month: July 2025

Hi! My name is Julie and this summer I am interning for HLAA Boston with my friend Alice. I want to start off this post stating that I don’t have hearing loss and I am not deaf, but at our school we have a great CAPS program so I work with and interact with lots of hard of hearing and deaf people. Also through this internship I have interacted and worked with many wonderful people who have hearing loss. I have seen the struggles and also the successes they have gone through. As someone who does not have hearing loss I have seen somethings that might be normal for people who have hearing loss but might be abnormal for people who don’t. Like I have seen many people try to speak louder to deaf people even though they can’t hear. In school forgetting captions on a video. While these are small things I think it can make people feel out of place and unwanted. Also in my time here I have learned that only 2% of the population of people with hearing loss know ASL, so if you meet someone with a hearing aid you shouldn’t assume they know ASL. Everyone’s experience with hearing loss is different and there is always a large variety of stories from each person. Talking to people who are so different but also connected by this experience you can see how they relate to each other but also how their experiences differ by each generation and each person. I hope in the future people with disabilities will be less stigmatized and will be given the accommodations they need. I see this organization bringing change and helping people with hearing loss as one step toward that!

Hello! My name is Alice and I am a rising senior who is interning with HLAA for the summer. I was assigned to make a blog post on this website to share my experience with hearing loss. As for some context, I was born with moderately severe conductive hearing loss as a result of not having ear canals. I wear a Bone Anchored Hearing Aid, or a BAHA, which is basically a quarter-sized device that rests on the side of my head, right behind my ear (see attached image). Because my hearing aid is not what people would typically think of as what a hearing aid is “supposed” to look like, I consistently get questions on what it is. The question I get the most is “what’s that?”, usually asked by young children, but I get lots of other questions too, including but not limited to: “what kind of headphone is that?”, “is that thing recording me?” or “are they using that to track your sleep or something?”. And it’s not just people with typical hearing asking these questions. A couple months ago, I was spending time with a preteen who also had hearing loss and she asked what my hearing aid was. When I told her it was my hearing aid, she responded “oh, I know what a hearing aid is but the ones I see never look like that.” That moment really stuck with me because it reminded me that hearing aids, like hearing loss itself, are wide in variety and often misunderstood. So, consider this post as a PSA. Hearing aids are not one size fits all. They come in many different shapes, sizes and colors, and are each specifically designed to help the person wearing them.  Thanks for reading! And if you’ve ever wondered “what’s that?”, now you know ;-).

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An open-captioned performance is a theatrical or cinematic presentation where a text display of dialogue and sound effects is visible to the entire audience. Unlike closed captions, which require a separate device, open captions are displayed on a screen or monitor, making them accessible to everyone in the audience, regardless of their hearing ability. 

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