Technological Advancements

They're really great, aren't they? Especially for the hearing impaired. I haven't updated in a while. I've been focusing on the job search. However, I have some very important updates, to be detailed further in another blog when I have more time and have discovered more about these things. Anyway, here are three technological advances that have either affected me or I hope will have a positive effect on my life and the lives of other hard of hearing, hearing impaired, deaf, and Deaf people in the near future!

1) Google announced today that auto captioning will be available to everyone! I'm excited. The sample video of Obama's speech about the earthquakes in Chile looks really good. Read the official YouTube blog for more information. I will update as I learn more about this, but the update was just made today.

2) I've been hearing more and more about a kind of captioning glasses- similar to the concept of 3D glasses- that have been developed by a group of grad students at UCLA. I missed the opportunity to attend a focus group to test these glasses, but I hear they're trying to figure out how to market them in the near future. This is such an awesome idea. With these glasses everyone who wants to see captions would be able to, and those hearing people who are bothered or distracted by captions won't have to see them. It's really an ingenious invention. Sure movie theaters offer a limited number of captioned showings of each movie they play, but I don't think it's enough. At any given theater, they will show a movie with captions for 2 or 3 days, 1 or 2 showings per day, during the whole month they're showing the flick. Who says my friends and I aren't just as busy as "hearing" people? Who says we can fit our schedules together during such a small time frame? Well, the movie theaters say we should be able to or just wait for the film to come out on DVD. It's just not right. I'm hoping these glasses get on the market soon, because they'd definitely solve the problem. Then again, waiting for DVD has its advantages, too. For one thing you can rent a DVD for 5 bucks instead of paying for tickets at 10 bucks a pop, plus whatever buying or renting these glasses might cost. Ideally they would be widely available for free to those who need/want them for accessibility purposes, but we do not live in a perfect world, so I suspect that it may cost us something to use this great new technology. It would definitely be worth it, though. I'll post more once I learn more about them.

3) I recently got my new blue tooth enabled hearing aid, the Phonak Versata P in cobalt/black and was scheduled to go in for a follow up today to tell the audiologist what needs to be adjusted. However, that's not going to happen until tomorrow, and boy do I have reasons to complain. I've only been wearing my new aid off and on because it bugs me so much. Oh, don't get me wrong. The blue tooth is awesome. Of course, I'm still getting used to the fact that I can just press a button on a device around my neck to answer the phone instead of searching the room for my phone, and there's a bit of interference, but for the most part it's been cool. I haven't gotten it to connect wirelessly with my laptop yet, but the device I got with it can be plugged into any ordinary headphone jack for audio input. It's still a pain to be plugged into my computer, but it's so much better to be hearing directly from my aid instead of having to take it out and put on huge headphones that press my glasses into my head. The most annoying thing that's been happening is that the interference- at least I think it's the interference- causes any little bang, clang, clap or snap to trigger a loud popping noise directly in my ear. I have to either switch out to my old hearing aid or put it on mute in order to do the dishes. Otherwise I'd go insane. The click, click, click when I turn on the gas burner on the stove? Pretty much unbearable. Sometimes even just typing loudly can trigger it. I'm hoping either it's something temporary or that it's an easy fix. Otherwise I really am likely to go insane. I started hearing this "beeeep beeeep", like one of those emergency tests on television, and it was getting more frequent with time. It took me a while to figure out that maybe it was an indication that the battery was low. My previous hearing aids supposedly had "warning beeps" but I never heard them. My aid just sort of slowly died. I'd be able to turn it off and on again and get it to work for another 5 minutes a few times until it finally died completely. I was also told that with my old aid my batteries would each last about two weeks, but this one seemed to go much faster. I don't know if it has to do with how often I've been plugging it in to the computer or what, but I changed the battery and guess what? The beeping has stopped. We'll see what happens at the audiologist tomorrow. It would be really cool if I could get this thing to connect wirelessly with my computer. We shall see.