Today is 20 years since my first cochlear implant (CI) activation. I cannot believe how fast time flew! Also, I’ve been hearing with a cochlear implant for a half of my life! I wore hearing aids before that.
Click the photo to watch the video
There are many videos online that either don’t have captions or have auto captions. Auto captions are not of acceptable quality. Bad captions are not better than no captions. Machine generated captions fail to meet many good quality captioning guidelines. It’s like reading a book that is not edited and includes a lot of grammatical mistakes – which makes it hard to enjoy the book. Low quality captions are like a poorly written book.
There are over 48 million of people with hearing loss in USA above age of 12, but only one in seven who could benefit from hearing aids uses them. The main reason is stigma related to hearing loss and also high costs of hearing devices. I find it sad that more people are willing to take annual eye exams, but not hearing exams – unless their hearing became worse to the point they need to take one to confirm they have hearing loss. Hearing tests are usually performed by an audiologist who then creates an audiogram showing the results of their patient’s hearing.
