“You can hear THAT, but you can’t hear THIS?”
“Wait, how’d YOU hear that?”
“You heard me just fine yesterday though.”
“Are you SURE you’re really hearing impaired?”
Do they not know that sound has different frequencies and hearing loss tends to - oh, why am I even asking?*
Because really, they don’t need to know that, they just need to have some basic manners.
What is it with abled people and “you did x <yesterday/in a different circumstance/whatever> so why not now? you’re clearly <faking it/not trying hard enough/etc>”?
*(For people who do wanna know, hearing loss often affects certain frequencies and not others, and mild hearing loss in one frequency can even cause someone to be hypersensitive to others. Frequencies are like… you know, the difference between bass and treble and talking voices.)
More examples of different pitches: a man’s voice tends to be lower pitched than a woman’s voice, a child’s voice tends to be very high. A tuba is very low pitch, a piccolo very high. Vowel sounds tend to be lower pitch than most consonants, and certain consonants like m, l, b, z, etc are lower pitched than others like s, sh, t, p, etc. It is common–*not* universal for all deaf/hard of hearing people, just common–for some/many people to hear low pitch sounds more easily.
Also, being deaf or HoH (or having audio processing disorder) means you’re always consuming *all* your energy and concentration on listening (if you hear speech at all) and lipreading. If someone is mumbling unclearly, or speaking too softly, or there is distracting background noise, a hearing person may be annoyed or frustrated but can deal by increasing the energy they invest into listening. A deaf/HoH person doesn’t have that option because we’re already ramped up at maximum power *all the time*. So these problems that are just annoying for you can devastate our ability to understand anything.
We also usually don’t have the ability to tune out or ignore certain sounds to focus on the ones we want, so if there are multiple sounds going on then instead of hearing distinct recognizable sounds, they might get all jumbled together and sound like a single chaotic noise. *Especially* if we also have audio processing disorder on top of being deaf/HoH–APD is *very* common (though not universal) among deaf/HoH people.
(via let-the-spectrum-in)
