by Bianca Waked
This post is a part of The COVID Chronicles series. This series is dedicated to giving voice to graduate student experiences and needs during the course of the pandemic. It is a space for graduate students to come together, to share, to listen, to reflect, to empathize, to lament, and to learn from one another. We hope that faculty and administrators will listen to and engage in dialogue with graduate students, and act in ways to help support the graduate student community.
Unlike the Deaf community, individuals who embrace the culture and experience of non-hearing, hard of hearing (HoH) and deaf people are often unnoticeably integrated among the hearing. While common stereotypes include aging parents and elderly neighbors, hearing loss affects a significant portion of the population, arising from a number of causes including genetics, illness, trauma, or ear infections. Racial and socioeconomic disparities further affect an individual’s chances of even getting tested for hearing loss, let alone being able to acquire the necessary accommodations if they do experience hearing loss.
Living with hearing loss, then, requires creativity and strategies to participate in social environments and speech-reading is one such strategy. Colloquially known as lip-reading and often employed by NFL coaches to steal an opposing team’s signals, speech-reading is a wide-spread tactic invoked by hearing and non-hearing people alike. By observing a speaker’s lip movements, tongue movement, facial expressions, and body language, we can infer what a speaker is saying. In other words, speakers integrate the sounds they hear with the visual cues available in order to understand what is said and respond accordingly.
Masks, however, cover the lower half of the face—the central source of such visual cues. For someone with even mild hearing loss, the blocking of lip movement and the muffling of sound can significantly impede their ability to understand and thus, communicate. And those of us with severe or profound hearing loss often rely on technologies like hearing aids, but they offer little help navigating the muffled sounds of speaking behind a mask. Hearing aids are not like glasses. They don’t correct hearing, they amplify sound in order to increase the likelihood that damaged nerves will detect it. But if the sound is muffled, as in the case of a masked speaker, then hearing aids only amplify muffled sounds.
Masks, then, are more than face coverings which protect people from spread of the Coronavirus. For many, they are an additional source of anxiety in already uncertain and chaotic times. Social distancing is an entirely different phenomenon when the world has turned your body into its own prison.
Universities hoping to open this upcoming fall must recognize the disproportionate impact that face coverings and social distancing will have on deaf and Hard of Hearing students. They complicate meetings with students and faculty members, impede our ability to teach undergraduate students, and make an already difficult campus environment even more inaccessible. And while accommodations like captionists, recordings, and interpreters can ease some burden, there is little to be done for the mental and psychological strain in such environments. University administrators have a responsibility to make campuses as safe as possible as we all navigate this pandemic together. So the necessity of masks to contain the spread of the virus is unquestionable, but the benefits of face coverings should not come at the cost of my already vulnerable community.