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Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate

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41–50 of 79 posts

Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate

#41
post #36

Why does he need your help? Why do you think he needs you to post on his behalf? It's likely the main issue is not his problem but the team's: a lack of documentation for the system or of any reasoned basis for decision-making. And that won't change until the team gives up on deciding what to do based on who-knows-whom with a veneer of process, and instead has honest design discussions and decisions, on the record.

I don't think that person asked the OP to reach out on their behalf. OP is just trying to learn how they can be respectful/supportive of the deaf person's condition and help.

Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate

#42

I 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.

Your company should provide better audio equipment for those users.

Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate

#43
You didn't say where you are, but many cities have Deaf and Hard of Hearing advocacy groups. You should reach out to them for resources for your teammate but also for you. They'll probably bend over backwards to help!

Also, unless your teammate is actively involved in whatever actions you take, you need to make sure they want help and that they communicate to you what they want help with. The last thing they want is an overconcerned workmate who gets in their business to "help".

Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate

#44
post #6

Is 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…

I really appreciate reading this. This is good for me to know if I ever have the opportunity to work with a non-hearing person (not sure what is considered the most acceptable term).

Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate

#45
post #6

Is 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…

Using the relay for a meeting? Have you done this effectively in a work environment?

Yes, I have done many virtual meetings using VRS. You do have to ensure that you do everything a little slower if you’re using a lot of technical language because the terps need time to fingerspell.

I’ve also used a video interpreting service for in person meetings (the terp is virtual everyone else is in person). That works well because private interpreter services will take the time to review a slide deck, notes, or a glossary ahead of time and learn any jargon or be prepared to come up with abbreviations with the Deaf coworker.

Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate

#46
We have a deaf team member. He asks for very little in the way of accommodations and performs very well at his role. At most he'll ask for CC to be turned on during a Teams Meeting when it's a 3rd party facilitator and that stuff is disabled by default.

What I picked up on early on was that he struggled during face-to-face meetings with reading lips. And I made a conscious effort to turn toward him, speak a little slower and more purposefully, and to reiterate what others said when responding to comments, which helped him tremendously.

That being said, our Org when 100% remote during the pandemic and if anything has made him a stronger member of the team because it forces more non-verbal communication.

Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate

#47

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.

> 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.

I think that could work in an environment where everything could be cleanly laid out and understood in advance, without room for error or confusion or misalignment. I think it is a lot easier to burn through misunderstandings with face to face or otherwise synchronous speech.

Detailed note taking is a good remedy for the whole "words only last as long as your throat cords vibrate" thing.

Although now that I think about it we're probably pretty close to agreeing, I'm really just pointing out the value of regular old talking as a good escape for when text based communications slow down or fail but implicitly I'm assuming a world where the default is text.. which is what it sounds like you'd prefer.

Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate

#48
Ask him! I bet he has a lot of the critical insight about what works best for him. (Maybe he's already expressing it?) And I also bet that asking him is the correct first step to integrating the insight he doesn't have. And I bet the fine details matter.

  "when Leonardo painted the portrait of Ginevra de Benci in 
  the National Gallery, he put a juniper bush behind her head. 
  In it he carefully painted each individual leaf. Many 
  painters might have thought, this is just something to put 
  in the background to frame her head. No one will look that 
  closely at it.

  Not Leonardo. How hard he worked on part of a painting 
  didn't depend at all on how closely he expected anyone to 
  look at it. He was like Michael Jordan. Relentless.

  Relentlessness wins because, in the aggregate, unseen 
  details become visible. When people walk by the portrait of 
  Ginevra de Benci, their attention is often immediately 
  arrested by it, even before they look at the label and 
  notice that it says Leonardo da Vinci. All those unseen 
  details combine to produce something that's just stunning, 
  like a thousand barely audible voices all singing in tune."

  ~ https://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
We all experience levels of communication that go beyond sufficient or effective. There's probably a zone of virtuosity that's hard to get to but invaluable if achieved where his way of communicating best is obviously neither defective nor deficient but uniquely, non-fungibly, performant and contributive. I feel unlocking unaccessed virtuosity is the key to achieving the truly apex outcomes we all want.

Kudos to you for striving to be inclusive!

EDIT check this out:

  "Benefit: More opportunities for quiet voices
  In many teams there are a combination of voices, some 
  quieter and some more assertive. Having this diversity on a 
  team is really beneficial, but can make it hard for everyone 
  to be heard. Quiet voices can find it harder to find a space 
  to interject their thoughts, or prefer to take time to think 
  about their response before communicating it, risking the 
  topic ending before the thought is shared.

  Text communication doesn’t discriminate against this 
  difference in communication style. Everyone can share their 
  ideas at their own pace, and the reader never knows how long 
  it might have taken to put thoughts into words. There’s no 
  waiting for turns, and order is more often determined by who 
  is online when, and what time in their schedule they have 
  blocked out for messages."

  ~https://buffer.com/resources/asynchronous-meetings/

Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate

#49
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your company should provide better audio equipment for those users.

They do, this guy insists on using his phone to join Zoom calls

Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate

#50
More generally I would encourage your teammate to check out JAN - Job Accommodation Network [0], and sit down with HR to discuss what they need.

They also have a nice a-z list [1] of every disability, limitation, and workfunction. You might find something for yourself that you struggle with and didn't know could be accommodated. Anything from physical limitations to random phobias can be accomodated.

[0] https://askjan.org/disabilities/Deafness.cfm

[1] https://askjan.org/a-to-z.cfm

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