Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate

I am hard of hearing and lip read to assist with following conversations.

I absolutely hate video conferencing tools. The sound is horrible and live captions are often incorrect. Very few people speak clearly enough for accurate captioning.

I prefer to read and be shown rather than being told. I prefer email, and avoid voicemail.

So if you are trying help your team mate, simply focus on alternatives to talking and listening. The internet is great for learning since so much good material is available in written form.

I don't have any resources to share, but it's great to see that people actually care, your buddy has a great team!

Pre-remote, I worked well with a deaf colleague by pair-programming across a corner of a desk so we were facing both each other and the screen.

We also changed standups to mean that only the person holding the Bluetooth mic connected to his cochlear implant could speak: that had the added benefit of stopping standups from falling into solution-finding exercises.

(I'm not deaf, and barely discuss with hard of hearing people, so I'm likely not relevant)

Main factor should be to ask him, to better understand how he "works around". "Best case comparaison" for video conferencing is IRL meetings. Does he feel "comfortable" with IRL meetings assuming proper lightning and face orientation? If not, then it's likely there is no fancy video conferencing that'll be ok, and just forget about video conferencing.

Assuming he reads lips, better video overall: Give all co-workers better cameras and lighting, check that Microsoft Teams doesn't compress stupidly (if it does, maybe try other systems...), have your coworkers frame the camera properly on their face. Better mics if he can hear a tiny bit.

Write minutes live in a shared document.

Is this a team mate at a US company? If so, note that Teams live captioning may not be enough to meet your non discrimination requirements. Your company may have a legal obligation to hire an ASL interpreter or human transcriber, including for in person meetings.

My biggest recommendation is to use a phone call for audio because he can then use America’s free video relay service for ASL or captioned telephone service. The captions on captioned telephone use both an AI and a human in conjunction, so they are much more accurate.

Try to do some audio-free team bonding exercises. Perhaps charades (with everyone typing answers).

If he uses ASL, learn some and provide resources to other teammates to learn some. Knowing some ASL, at minimum enough to do some small talk, will be a huge sign of respect towards him if that’s his native language.

Finally, something that people might not think about: If he misses something someone said and asks you what it was, never say "it's nothing" or "it wasn't important" or "it was just a joke" no matter how minor the comment was. Just repeat it no matter what.

We have someone deaf on my team too. Text chat is the best way to do it. Often we'll screen share in addition to chatting on a client like Slack and that works well in my experience. We find live captions a bit hit and miss, but it helps when there's no alternative. Normally in addition to live captions we'll have someone add notes in chat too.

I've never been diagnosed with anything officially but I have a stutter problem and I struggle to convert my thoughts to words in real-time. So even for someone like myself I find text preferable to voice/video meetings most of the time anyway. I suspect a lot of non-native speakers probably feel similar too.

Video / voice meetings can be nice to do from time to time for casual meetings such as retrospectives, but when I need to explain something technical I'd rather have time to compile my thoughts and write them down in a way that's clear and easy to understand. Plus if I write it down it's stored on Slack for later reference and it's more accessible for those who struggle with audible communication.

Stop wasting everyone's time with face to face meetings. Words are meaningless, easily misinterpreted and non binding.

Written documentation of actions are easily referenced and binding.

I don’t have any practical suggestions for you but I recently read the novel “True Biz”[1] and it was a really great introduction to Deaf culture. I can’t remember the last time I learned so much from a work of fiction. The author also deliberately doesn’t use quotation marks so the formatting of the dialog makes reading and understanding it a little jarring at first which is a neat way for a book to subtly drop the reader into a situation where language and communication don’t really behave the way you expect and you’re forced to adjust accordingly.

[1]https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/ae20c558-ecff-4258-a8e0-...

Have you spoken with him about what he'd like?

I think everyone has different tastes (both personal and also in relation to the types of hearing loss they have) and one of my buttons in particular is when people go out of their way to do everything... except ask what I prefer.

For example, if he prefers to do video chats (I myself do), he may appreciate hand raising/visual cues before speaking (to context switch), clear lighting and dimmer backgrounds (to help lip reading/curing), better mics (basically not anything onboard). Additionally, things like someone taking minutes and recording decisions can be helpful for review afterward to clear up misconceptions or assumptions.

It may be that no matter how many video chat accommodations there are, he may not feel completely included and would prefer text of some kind.

I think another important thing is to make him feel welcome to interrupt or say something outside of the meetings, both implicitly and through explicit reminders -- sometimes it turns out that some accommodations don't work out, or someone is just particularly difficult to understand (accents, enunciation), or something just throws it all out the window (people without cameras, suddenly noisy backgrounds, etc) and it can be hard being the odd one out saying "Hey, this actually isn't working."

I think really though, my strongest recommendation would be to keep him actively involved in accommodations without springing anything on him.

Edit: I want to emphasize that I do think it's great that you're reaching out and trying to help! I just also want to emphasize that for some people, loss of agency regarding how they handle their accommodations, no matter how well-intentioned, can feel bad.

A lot of folks here wants you to ask him what he wants.

Be prepared to hear that he doesn’t know what would help. But he will appreciate that you’re giving him agency.

One of the challenges I have with this question as someone who is mainstreamed, profoundly deaf (this means I don’t know sign language) is that deafness takes a number of forms, so there’s no real one size fits all solution.

But far be it for me to point out problems not suggest solutions!

* ask him if it would help to provide a real-time transcription service. This is not an automated system but a specially trained human who will transcribe meetings in real time.

* ask him if he wants someone to write a meeting summary that captures decisions made, action items delegated etc. then make sure that happens.

* ask him if an ASL interpreter would help.

* sign up for sign language courses yourself and use your professional development budget to pay for it. If he doesn’t know ASL ask if he would want to learn also. Pay for his training.

* help him find a professional community of deaf persons to be a part of. Give him options. No group is perfect for everyone.

* the biggest barrier he will face in his life is isolation. So support him so that he doesn’t feel isolated.

* if your company throws company events for everyone to participate in, try to create a something similar, running concurrently, that’s accessible for him. Solicit ideas from him but it could look like a small group chat online or playing games online.

* hearing aids (if he needs them) are REALLY FRICKING EXPENSIVE - benefits typically cover up to $500 and aids can cost $2-7K. Offer to buy his next pair.

This is all off the top of my head. I could probably think of more with some time.

I hope this helps. Thank you for taking the initiative to make him feel part of your team.

(Edit: formatting)

Howdy there. I create transcripts for executive board meetings; providing live comprehension assistance for someone like this has been a thing I've mulled occasionally, as it would be nice to do something meaningful when I'm not detailing the intrigues of the corporate elite. If you'd like to discuss it, feasibility on my end would be primarily determined by your meeting frequency and duration — I don't have to keep any particular hours for my primary transcription work, but I deal with high volume. Rough estimate for availability: if you're in Teams meetings with your colleague fewer than 6ish hours a week, that could be tenable. If that fits, I'm very interested in seeing if I can help y'all.

I will never understand why people choose to have business meetings in the first place. In every scenario that doesn’t include personal introductions, everyone would be better off collaborating digitally.

Perhaps we are still missing the tools to do that effectively.

Crucially, I don’t mean we need another face-to-face/mouth-to-ear communication tool, or yet another way to write the same documents together. We need a new paradigm for thinking collaboratively, and tools to support that.

There’s your free billion dollar idea for today.

It may not be well-known in the hearing community, but for some people sign language (generally ASL in the USA) is their first language, and English is their second.

I obviously don't know what the case is here, but switching to text meetings or live captioning isn't necessarily a full solution for all deaf people.

Why does he need your help?

Why do you think he needs you to post on his behalf?

It's likely the main issue is not his problem but the team's: a lack of documentation for the system or of any reasoned basis for decision-making. And that won't change until the team gives up on deciding what to do based on who-knows-whom with a veneer of process, and instead has honest design discussions and decisions, on the record.

One thing I haven’t seen mentioned much here is this: make an active, ongoing effort to include them in your teams social life.

Most people just give up when trying to communicate with people that struggle with spoken English as a modality. That can be a profoundly isolating experience.

You didn't say where you are, but many cities have Deaf and Hard of Hearing advocacy groups. You should reach out to them for resources for your teammate but also for you. They'll probably bend over backwards to help!

Also, unless your teammate is actively involved in whatever actions you take, you need to make sure they want help and that they communicate to you what they want help with. The last thing they want is an overconcerned workmate who gets in their business to "help".

We have a deaf team member. He asks for very little in the way of accommodations and performs very well at his role. At most he'll ask for CC to be turned on during a Teams Meeting when it's a 3rd party facilitator and that stuff is disabled by default.

What I picked up on early on was that he struggled during face-to-face meetings with reading lips. And I made a conscious effort to turn toward him, speak a little slower and more purposefully, and to reiterate what others said when responding to comments, which helped him tremendously.

That being said, our Org when 100% remote during the pandemic and if anything has made him a stronger member of the team because it forces more non-verbal communication.

Ask him! I bet he has a lot of the critical insight about what works best for him. (Maybe he's already expressing it?) And I also bet that asking him is the correct first step to integrating the insight he doesn't have. And I bet the fine details matter.

  "when Leonardo painted the portrait of Ginevra de Benci in 
  the National Gallery, he put a juniper bush behind her head. 
  In it he carefully painted each individual leaf. Many 
  painters might have thought, this is just something to put 
  in the background to frame her head. No one will look that 
  closely at it.

  Not Leonardo. How hard he worked on part of a painting 
  didn't depend at all on how closely he expected anyone to 
  look at it. He was like Michael Jordan. Relentless.

  Relentlessness wins because, in the aggregate, unseen 
  details become visible. When people walk by the portrait of 
  Ginevra de Benci, their attention is often immediately 
  arrested by it, even before they look at the label and 
  notice that it says Leonardo da Vinci. All those unseen 
  details combine to produce something that's just stunning, 
  like a thousand barely audible voices all singing in tune."

  ~ https://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

We all experience levels of communication that go beyond sufficient or effective. There's probably a zone of virtuosity that's hard to get to but invaluable if achieved where his way of communicating best is obviously neither defective nor deficient but uniquely, non-fungibly, performant and contributive. I feel unlocking unaccessed virtuosity is the key to achieving the truly apex outcomes we all want.

Kudos to you for striving to be inclusive!

EDIT check this out:

  "Benefit: More opportunities for quiet voices
  In many teams there are a combination of voices, some 
  quieter and some more assertive. Having this diversity on a 
  team is really beneficial, but can make it hard for everyone 
  to be heard. Quiet voices can find it harder to find a space 
  to interject their thoughts, or prefer to take time to think 
  about their response before communicating it, risking the 
  topic ending before the thought is shared.

  Text communication doesn’t discriminate against this 
  difference in communication style. Everyone can share their 
  ideas at their own pace, and the reader never knows how long 
  it might have taken to put thoughts into words. There’s no 
  waiting for turns, and order is more often determined by who 
  is online when, and what time in their schedule they have 
  blocked out for messages."

  ~https://buffer.com/resources/asynchronous-meetings/

More generally I would encourage your teammate to check out JAN - Job Accommodation Network [0], and sit down with HR to discuss what they need.

They also have a nice a-z list [1] of every disability, limitation, and workfunction. You might find something for yourself that you struggle with and didn't know could be accommodated. Anything from physical limitations to random phobias can be accomodated.

[0] https://askjan.org/disabilities/Deafness.cfm

[1] https://askjan.org/a-to-z.cfm

If live captioning fails for whatever reason and someone who types slowly needs to communicate, an option is asking the person to speak calmly and clearly as if speaking to an audience of 100 people. Calm simple language makes the guy at the back who can't hear every word understand you and a lip reader who may miss a few words would be able to understand

Check out talknagish.com. They have a phone app that converts phone calls into text in real-time (better accuracy than teams) and they have an add on for zoom/teams/meet that allows Deaf/HH users to read captions in real time and type instead or in addition to using their voice

When in video meetings with team members, there are often a few people who do not turn on their video camera because of some reason given like "they are shy" or something.

This is unacceptable because they have no problem with showing their face in the office instead of concealing it behind a veil.

These people need to be reminded that to be inclusive with this team member, they need to turn their camera on.

I remember one job interview I had, I had my camera on, and the two people interviewing me had theirs off. Difficult situation for me because it makes a difference in communication being able to see the person, and also, a job interview is especially difficult because one wishes to not upset the interviewer. But in retrospect, I think if this situation occurred again I would speak up and ask if it would be possible for them to turn on the camera.

Camera being on or off in meetings can be passive-aggressiveness.

Your team mate should post his story himself. If you post for him it is like he cannot speak for himself.

Discrimination can be so subtle that people aren't aware that they discriminate, yet it is damaging.

Deaf people have a word for this phenomen: Hearing Privilege.

Note: I am Deaf myself and sometimes I lend Hacker News my view about my experiences being a Deaf programmer and legal.