21–30 of 38 posts
People with that disability now are doing interviews and getting jobs. Not possible before. It needs one time investment in a fast smartphone.
Please consider using "hearing impaired" as a more inclusive term, or ideally "deaf and hard of hearing". Their are plenty of people who can still hear some things but are not entirely deaf.
Of Deaf and hard of hearing people I know, the young ones (less than 50) all really dislike the term "hearing impaired" because it implies that they are impaired (in the view of many, it's hearing people who are impaired because we don't know how to communicate using sign languages). Many also believe that "Deaf" should be capitalized because of the Deaf community's shared language and culture.
Some of my best memories of my grandmother and her brother (my great uncle) as a kid were at my grandmother’s house, whenever she had a phone call from her brother. Her talking to her brother via a physical TTY terminal with the phone handset in the terminal receiver was just so fascinating, captivating and interesting to see in the 90s as a kid.
Please consider using "hearing impaired" as a more inclusive term, or ideally "deaf and hard of hearing". Their are plenty of people who can still hear some things but are not entirely deaf.
Of Deaf and hard of hearing people I know, the young ones (less than 50) all really dislike the term "hearing impaired" because it implies that they are impaired (in the view of many, it's hearing people who are impaired because we don't know how to communicate using sign languages). Many also believe that "Deaf" should be capitalized because of the Deaf community's shared language and culture.
But that's actually why I use the term myself. I have found that euphemisms, including "hard of hearing" often don't successfully communicate what needs to be conveyed.
"Hard of hearing" just doesn't seem to sink in. Even "very hard of hearing" doesn't. Often the other person thinks it must be like struggling to hear the high notes in music or something. While I'm not deaf (and definitely not culturally Deaf), I generally can't understand spoken language without amplification. This often seems to surprise people, even when I've told them ahead that I'm hard of hearing.
"Nearly deaf" or "mostly deaf" would be accurate enough, but it feels odd and I don't like it. "Severe hearing impairment" communicates my experience, and also the accommodations I may need from others, quite effectively.
Working in IT, the vast majority of engineers and IT adjacent people have little care or desire to learn about phone or communications systems. Especially nowadays when Teams and Zoom take care of your VoIP woes on the backend, and AWS or Azure are always doing something way cooler than a PBX can. I was lucky to work alongside an enterprise PBX architect and not only learn about phone systems, but come to appreciate…
We had pulse-tone rotary phones which were simple enough to understand - just count the pulses. I'm still working on completely grasping the combined tones used in touch-tone dialing, specifically the way they would have been interpreted at the switchboard before the introduction of digital PBX systems.
Working in IT, the vast majority of engineers and IT adjacent people have little care or desire to learn about phone or communications systems. Especially nowadays when Teams and Zoom take care of your VoIP woes on the backend, and AWS or Azure are always doing something way cooler than a PBX can. I was lucky to work alongside an enterprise PBX architect and not only learn about phone systems, but come to appreciate…
A couple of years ago I converted a telephone handset into a lineman's handset to troubleshoot the PBX system at work. As a kid I'd always marveled at how two-way voice (and data!) communication and numbers could be transmitted over four wires, and it really blew my mind when I learned that just two are being used per line. We had pulse-tone rotary phones which were simple enough to understand - just count the pulses…
TTY has been around since the 1800s. He did not invent the TTY. He invented the TDD.
Teletypes in Switzerland were ITU V.21 with three modifications: - 110 baud instead of 300 baud - not full duplex - carrier tone I experimented with a Java application and FFT to try to write a soft modem, so I still know the exact specification by heart. Bit 1 was 960 Hz, Bit 0 was 1160 Hz, the carrier tone 1060 Hz, and there were 2 stop bits. This means, the teletype could transmit 11 letters a second. The carrier…
I wish we had a convention like this for text messages. Some generally accepted way to “hang up” that isn’t taken as rude.
It’s a nonissue with people you text frequently, the conversation just waxes and wanes naturally. Maybe it’s just me, but for texts with acquaintances, distant relations, etc, theres no good way to end the interaction like there is over the phone. You can’t just text “alright I gotta go, talk to you later”.