Meet Julie and Brad, the hard of hearing hosts of the accessible online platform: “Hearing Things with Julie and Brad” (BSL)

Hi all, our names are Julie DeMatteo-Lane and Brad McKenna, and we are two hard of hearing friends and business partners based out of Boston, Massachusetts.

We are the hosts of a weekly YouTube series, “Hearing Things with Julie and Brad”. We use our experience as a teacher and a librarian, respectively, to inform, educate, and entertain others about life with hearing loss.

Additionally, we write blog posts and record short videos for various social media platforms.

It all started with a shrug.

We met at a party in a crowded living room.  As fate would have it, we sat next to one another in that sea of incomprehensible cross-talk. Being the tail end of a raucous party, our listening fatigue had set in. It was simply too much to decipher even one of the conversations.

We arrived at this point at the same moment. We turned toward one another and shrugged, dissolved into laughter, and a collaborative partnership of an extreme extrovert and intrepid introvert was born.

We both benefit from the use of hearing aids, are rabid Boston Bruins hockey fans, and own Boston Terriers, but that is where our similarities end. The most notable difference is our hearing loss history and our approach to living life as hard of hearing people in a hearing world.

Brad has hereditary bilateral sensorineural hearing loss. The majority of his father’s side has hearing aids but he didn’t advocate, or even acknowledge, his hearing loss growing up. He only started speaking up for himself when COVID-19 put his ability to continue to be a librarian in doubt.

Now that he’s started to do simple things like self-identify as hard of hearing and ask people to face him when they speak, he’s realized that his hearing loss affects every part of his life.

Julie, however, has been advocating for herself since she was a child. She has never shied away from making her presence and accommodation needs known. Julie has significant, degenerative bilateral sensorineural deafness of unknown origin. She is the only member of her family with a disability.

She realised early on that she was navigating a world not designed with her needs in mind, but that certainly hasn’t stopped her from enjoying a career as a special education teacher.

The stark contrast of our life experiences and personalities is at the heart of our work. Our flagship production, “Hearing Things with Julie and Brad”, is peppered with research on critical hearing loss related topics such as cochlear implants, Bluetooth technology, and caption apps.

There is also the occasional impassioned and entertaining rants as we rail against games designed to mimic hearing loss, lack of disability representation in literature, and flashing fire alarms. The ability to find joy in the mundane and our constant giggling is at the core of our connection and collaboration..

Another of our motivations is addressing the stigma of hearing loss. For example, hearing aids are not like glasses, they do not correct, they aid. It’s right there in the name! Hearing aids do not correct hearing, they amplify sound based on your hearing loss.

And amplification is not clarification. That means getting aids is the start of the struggle to hearing better, not the end. There are plenty of other hearing assistive technologies that we need to use alongside our aids.

As we look to the future, we have – unsurprisingly – opposite ideas of what we’d like our collaborative efforts to yield.

Brad would prefer to be left alone in a comfortable office writing while surrounded by books, his laptop, and notebooks as a way to spread the word about the challenges faced by those with hearing loss.

Julie is most comfortable in front of the camera, and would love to be afforded the opportunity to be featured on a variety of morning shows including her favorite, “The Today Show”, in which she will drag a reluctant Brad onstage with her.

However, there is a shared goal of being able to co-author books that feature strong, contemporary characters with hearing loss – preferably written in a stone house overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.

All of our content can be found on our company website, Down the Tubes Productions, at https://dttproductions.com.