Gary Lester: The challenges of remote working for deaf people during the pandemic

In August 2020, whilst in the middle of pandemic-caused job hunting, I decided to write an article aimed at Employers (click here for details) taken from the perspective of an office based worker. I had never done remote working for any length of time prior to this.

I started a new job in November 2020 and have found it extremely challenging because of the need for remote working. I have therefore decided to write about the individual challenges with the aim of raising awareness for all concerned.

Audio quality

Remote working means just one thing during a pandemic and that is remote conference calls. Imagine the scenario of connecting to a conference call with people from around the world. For each of the meeting participants they may face the challenge of poor audio quality.

It is directly dependent on their service provider and presumably the amount of money that they have decided to pay for bandwidth. If participants hear garbled voices or a delay in speech, it is likely due to bandwidth issues. If even one participant on the call has a poor VoIP or cellular connection, it can cause audio quality issues for everyone in the meeting.

Poor call quality can also be attributed to inadequate Bluetooth headsets which sometimes relay muffled or ‘laggy’ sound and the owner of that headset may not even be aware of this as they happily chat away thinking that their effort to explain a key concept is being understood whereas the reality is many people on the call are sitting there thinking about how muffled the sound is and what was it that was just said.

Jewellery /Long fingernails

The sort of thing that a deaf person might notice that someone with typical hearing may not is the clanging of jewellery whilst someone is typing away.

Hearing aids are amplifiers and therefore amplify all sound indiscriminately. It means that jewellery sounds override human speech at that moment in time. Similarly, if someone is typing and they have long finger nails, the sound it makes can be very distracting.

People talking over each other

I am often on calls with 20-25 participants. Typically around 4-6 people do most of the talking but conversations can become intense at times, at which point people end up speaking over each other to be heard, even before a person has finished what they are saying.

For deaf people, the overlapping sounds merge and become unintelligible – resulting in lost information.

Lack of meeting context

Many meetings, especially when you are a new employee, will have people who have worked at an organisation for many years and have a great deal of expertise in their subject matter.

A mistake that is often made is that people launch directly into the meeting without giving full context. To see who does this really well, have a read of what Amazon and Google amongst others do before they start a meeting (click here for details).

For deaf people, going into a meeting full of well known acronyms and assumed knowledge of context is even more difficult as they try and navigate their way through, trying to attain new knowledge along with the auditory challenges mentioned in this article.

Background sound

Nobody asked for a pandemic! To that end, the entire world has had to adapt to it which includes attending meetings from unlikely places in the home like the bedroom or the same room that your children are home schooling in.

Similarly, a person’s home may be situated in a really built up area with a lot of external noises from traffic and building sites. When they moved there they did not necessarily take into account the need for a quiet background to be able to work remotely.

For deaf people this is especially challenging….a crying child in the background, someone washing up plates and cutlery, the tv/radio is on (quietly but still audibly) in the background, a fan is whirring nearby etc.

Most of these sounds will be filtered out by the amazing human brain by an able hearing person. Once again though, for deaf people their hearing aid amplifies all of these sounds which can be so distracting as to make you lose your train of thought during a meeting. Once you have lost your concentration, you potentially lose vital information.

Type of room

Rooms with high ceilings mean sound bounces around. I can tell the difference when someone is in a room like this because the sound is very hollow and echo-ey. When trying to understand what someone is saying, it exacerbates interpretation of what is being said.

Accents

There are a multitude of accents in our daily lives when working for a global organisation. Equally clients can be located anywhere in the world.

For an English speaker there are some accents that are intrinsically easy to understand like Australian, American, English and then there are more tricky accents like the Irish, Scottish, Indian, Spanish or Italian accents (amongst others).

Amongst the English speaking nations, the cadence of speech tends to be the same for all and so broadly speaking they are understandable.

However when we turn to countries where English is not the first language then it introduces additional difficulty when trying to decipher the variations of pronunciation and often grammatically incorrect English. (I am not knocking them, I would love the be able to speak a foreign language as well as they speak English…well I can but thats not the point, its just harder to understand information being conveyed).

Combined with deafness, accents can be one of the biggest impediments to understanding what is being said.

Voice

As human beings we are all different and what goes with that is the incredible spectrum that a voice can be part of….very high, very low, something in between, voices with a lot of bass, gravelly voices etc etc.

If you combine the variation of voices with speed of speech, elocution and how well a voice is projected then you end up with positive or negative outcomes.

For a deaf person, if someone has a gravely voice, speaks very quickly and has a foreign accent it can be extremely tough to work out what is being said. There are many other combinations which are equally challenging.

The use of video (or not)

There have been a number of studies on the complex topic of nonverbal communication with varying results.

However, most experts agree that 70 to 93 percent of all communication is nonverbal. To that end, some organisations have a culture of voice only conference calls which means there is a lot of communication being missed.

Having said that, it is understandable given that many people may not wish to share their living arrangements with their colleagues. It does present a problem for deaf people, especially if they are used to lip reading.

Can technology help?

Thats is still up for debate, I have yet to find anything fit for purpose:

• Speech to text applications abound but I have yet to find one that is really able to handle the complexity of human accents AND
• There are legal challenges with respect to recording of the meeting which require explicit permission from every person in the meeting.

In summary, to those that are able hearing people, during these strange times when we are obliged to work remotely, consider the points which I have mentioned above. Doing so can only contribute to make for a much more productive and inclusive meeting.

Gary Lester is an e-commerce business analyst, specialising in SAP Commerce, with over 10 years experience in the retail sector, although he has worked in other sectors too. He has had hearing loss since birth, the same as his father. He says: “Since the pandemic started I have found, that searching for a job and then working in a new job, much more challenging having had to work remotely which has prompted me to write a few articles both around job searching and working remotely during the pandemic.”