10 Days Without Internet When You're Hard of Hearing

I did have Ava. Ava is a voice recognition system used for in-person conversations. Two or more people sign on to the app on their smartphones. Their voices are simultaneously captioned on each user's phone, color-coded by speaker. Ava is still in the testing stage, but you can download it here. The version I was using required Wi-Fi, but the newest version, which I downloaded (free) today, no longer requires Wi-Fi. I had a nice conversation with someone in the dog park. I could understand him over the yapping dogs because he was talking into my Ava-equipped phone.

Email was difficult. I'm a voluminous emailer, not only because I'm hard of hearing, but also because of the work I do both professionally and as a volunteer. The volume of mail I receive gets lost on the small screen of a smartphone. For those of us with hearing loss, email tends to be a lifeline for communicating with others. I did email on my smartphone (using satellite technology rather than Wi-Fi). But once I had Wi-Fi again and went back through the emails on my computer, I saw I'd missed quite a few. Also, no matter what size phone screen you have, it's still pretty small.

Sherry Turkle's 2011 book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, prompted consternation about the "death of conversation" due to an overdependence on technology.

But for those of us with hearing loss, technology is sometimes the only way we can communicate. In a restaurant we may be looking at our smartphones, but that's because we're getting captioning from a program like Ava telling us what the speaker across the table is saying. At the theater we may be looking at a smartphone, but that's because we're lucky enough to be at a performance with I-Captions or Globetitles.

Texting and emailing are conversation for people with hearing loss. I was surprised by how handicapped I felt without high-speed internet. I lived two-thirds of my life before the internet came along, so you'd think I'd know how to manage for a week or so. I wasn't as hard of hearing then, it's true. But also, once you've enjoyed the advantages that Wi-Fi and DSL offer those with hearing loss, it's really hard to give them up.