Cohousing-L Mailing List: Impaired hearing and cohousing

[Bob Morrison (bomorris]

 On 5/13/04, Kay Argyle wrote:

> Noise control strongly affects everyone's comfort, and for anyone with
> poor hearing or overactive fight-or-flight responses, it really is an
> accessibility issue, despite the tendency to limit such considerations to
> more recognized impairments like paraplegia or blindness.

 Thank you for writing this. This brings up an issue I have been thinking
about discussing on the list for a while.
 Based on my experience as a potential member of three cohousing
groups, I think it would be very hard for someone with poor hearing to be
in a cohousing group. For example, for whole-group discussions the
group usually sits in a large circle. Someone who has poor hearing would
continually have to ask whoever is talking to talk louder, and still would
miss a good part of the discussion. If you were to use a P.A. system,
you would have to have at least one mike for every two people, because
the nature of these discussions is such that passing a mike around among
a lot of people wouldn't work. So you would have a large capital expense
for the system, plus the labor of setting it up before every meeting and
taking it down after.
 There is a lot of public misunderstanding about imparied hearing. A lot
of these people have a total hearing loss above a certain frequency. When
these high frequencies are missing, you can't hear speech properly, and
no amount of amplification can fix it. Hearing aids for these people work
by amplifying sound more at the frequencies where the hearing loss is
greatest.
 One problem that engineers haven't been able to solve (within a price
range that most people can afford) is that people who use hearing aids
usually can't hear speech in the presence of background noise. In the
context of cohousing, this means a hearing-impaired person would have
a hard time at meetings if there is second-hand noise from the room
where the kids are, even if everyone else can hear just fine over this
noise.
 My hearing is OK, but my father has very bad hearing, and I have
learned a lot from this experience.

Bob Morrison