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.
Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate
41–50 of 79 posts
Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate
#42I 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.
Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate
#43Also, 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
#44Is 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…
Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate
#45Is 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?
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
#46What 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
#47Stop 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.
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 "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
#49Earlier 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.
Re: Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate
#50They 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.