Stop wasting everyone's time with face to face meetings. Words are meaningless, easily misinterpreted and non binding.
Written documentation of actions are easily referenced and binding.
Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate
11–20 of 79 posts
Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate
#12Stop wasting everyone's time with face to face meetings. Words are meaningless, easily misinterpreted and non binding. Written documentation of actions are easily referenced and binding.
> Words are meaningless, easily misinterpreted and non binding.
I wish more people recognized this, instead of expecting everyone else to remember "that thing that we talked about, like, last week".
I imagine it should be possible to create an organization where all communication would be just specification and documentation. I wonder if there is anything that can't in principle be done that way.
Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate
#13Is this a team mate at a US company? If so, note that Teams live captioning may not be enough to meet your non discrimination requirements. Your company may have a legal obligation to hire an ASL interpreter or human transcriber, including for in person meetings. My biggest recommendation is to use a phone call for audio because he can then use America’s free video relay service for ASL or captioned telephone service…
https://www.drawbattle.io/ is a great bonding game with no audio needs
Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate
#14I don’t have any practical suggestions for you but I recently read the novel “True Biz”[1] and it was a really great introduction to Deaf culture. I can’t remember the last time I learned so much from a work of fiction. The author also deliberately doesn’t use quotation marks so the formatting of the dialog makes reading and understanding it a little jarring at first which is a neat way for a book to subtly drop the reader into a situation where language and communication don’t really behave the way you expect and you’re forced to adjust accordingly.
[1]https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/ae20c558-ecff-4258-a8e0-...
Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate
#15Stop wasting everyone's time with face to face meetings. Words are meaningless, easily misinterpreted and non binding. Written documentation of actions are easily referenced and binding.
> Words are meaningless, easily misinterpreted and non binding. I wish more people recognized this, instead of expecting everyone else to remember "that thing that we talked about, like, last week". I imagine it should be possible to create an organization where all communication would be just specification and documentation. I wonder if there is anything that can't in principle be done that way.
It is nice where it works out. Some organizations have staff working manual labor who are not as literate or articulate with written communication. Some organizations are competing at a pace where a rival organization can beat them with a well run meeting over waiting for emails to be written, read, and replied to.
Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate
#16Have you spoken with him about what he'd like?
I think everyone has different tastes (both personal and also in relation to the types of hearing loss they have) and one of my buttons in particular is when people go out of their way to do everything... except ask what I prefer.
For example, if he prefers to do video chats (I myself do), he may appreciate hand raising/visual cues before speaking (to context switch), clear lighting and dimmer backgrounds (to help lip reading/curing), better mics (basically not anything onboard). Additionally, things like someone taking minutes and recording decisions can be helpful for review afterward to clear up misconceptions or assumptions.
It may be that no matter how many video chat accommodations there are, he may not feel completely included and would prefer text of some kind.
I think another important thing is to make him feel welcome to interrupt or say something outside of the meetings, both implicitly and through explicit reminders -- sometimes it turns out that some accommodations don't work out, or someone is just particularly difficult to understand (accents, enunciation), or something just throws it all out the window (people without cameras, suddenly noisy backgrounds, etc) and it can be hard being the odd one out saying "Hey, this actually isn't working."
I think really though, my strongest recommendation would be to keep him actively involved in accommodations without springing anything on him.
Edit: I want to emphasize that I do think it's great that you're reaching out and trying to help! I just also want to emphasize that for some people, loss of agency regarding how they handle their accommodations, no matter how well-intentioned, can feel bad.
Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate
#17Is this a team mate at a US company? If so, note that Teams live captioning may not be enough to meet your non discrimination requirements. Your company may have a legal obligation to hire an ASL interpreter or human transcriber, including for in person meetings. My biggest recommendation is to use a phone call for audio because he can then use America’s free video relay service for ASL or captioned telephone service…
> Finally, something that people might not think about: If he misses something someone said and asks you what it was, never say "it's nothing" or "it wasn't important" or "it was just a joke" no matter how minor the comment was. Just repeat it no matter what.
This is absolutely critical. It's hard enough to interrupt multiple times (especially when you need to ask about the same misheard thing multiple times) and being shut down makes it even harder.
Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate
#18Pre-remote, I worked well with a deaf colleague by pair-programming across a corner of a desk so we were facing both each other and the screen. We also changed standups to mean that only the person holding the Bluetooth mic connected to his cochlear implant could speak: that had the added benefit of stopping standups from falling into solution-finding exercises.
> We also changed standups to mean that only the person holding the Bluetooth mic connected to his cochlear implant could speak: that had the added benefit of stopping standups from falling into solution-finding exercises. That's wonderful! As the parent of a child with bilateral hearing loss, this accommodation would help immensely in his future work and study environments.
It went even further than that: as he had difficulty in lip reading at a shallow angle in the original (too big) team circle it was the catalyst we needed to split the team into three smaller sub-teams, which also benefited the overall team’s performance.
Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate
#19Stop wasting everyone's time with face to face meetings. Words are meaningless, easily misinterpreted and non binding. Written documentation of actions are easily referenced and binding.
I'm tired of people always jumping on the latest technological hype-train. O.K Typing is great but I used Speech successfully for decades before it was deprecated and I'm not going to jump on the latest trend and change my whole workflow and tooling just because young devs want to add the cool new tech like "Typing" to their resumes.
Words are semantic units, they are by definition and purpose: meaningful.
Speech is also:
* Synchronous
* A faster form of communication than the fastest typers
* A much much faster form of communication than the average typer
* Has incredibly good built-in features for communication like:
* The ability to see who's currently talking
* The ability to communicate a thought almost continuously rather than discretely
* The ability to be interrupted to provide new information when necessary
* Built-in styling features like tone, feeling, volume to emphasize important information
* Built-in synchronous next-speaker negotiation
* Privacy respecting and non-binding which is incredibly important in heavily regulated industries where everything recorded must be very carefully thought out because it might come up in discovery 10 years later
Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate
#20I am hard of hearing and lip read to assist with following conversations. I absolutely hate video conferencing tools. The sound is horrible and live captions are often incorrect. Very few people speak clearly enough for accurate captioning. I prefer to read and be shown rather than being told. I prefer email, and avoid voicemail. So if you are trying help your team mate, simply focus on alternatives to talking and li…
The worst is that one person that seems to exist on every team whose microphone sounds like it's being filtered through Satan's asshole, and they do nothing to attempt to improve the situation no matter how many times you tell them their audio is incomprehensible.