People often fail to consider the physical environment. The various aspects of the physical environment will impact the individual’s ability and endurance in speech reading and will impact how much benefit they may obtain from their hearing aids
Is the room light or dark--and will the lights remain on throughout the class? Are there shadows on the speaker’s face? Can the person with the hearing impairment sit relatively close (within 20 feet) to the speaker with an unobstructed view? Is the speaker moving around a lot or facing a board and writing? Remember, persons with a hearing loss depend on a variety of cues (e.g., visual, auditory, and contextual) to help them interpret what they are hearing. Speech reading will still be important, whether or not an assistive listening device is being used. All of these factors can impact the individual’s ability to speech read by reducing the visibility and increasing stress and eyestrain. As you can imagine, a good deal of stamina is needed to speech read for long periods of time. In fact, before people realize they are experiencing a hearing loss, they often first recognize that they feel tired or stressed all the time.
In considering whether an environment is noisy or quiet, remember the function of the hearing aid. It amplifies all sounds coming in. Also remember that the average noise level in a room is 56dB. Right now, look around the room and think about it. Is there a fan running in the heating or cooling system? Can you hear the projector fan running? Is there background music or sound drifting in from another room or hallway? What about the people sitting around you? Are they shuffling papers, fidgeting or retrieving papers, pencils, etc.? Because speech is not the only sound amplified by the hearing aid, it is impossible for hearing aid users to tune out the background noise, and therefore very difficult to tune into speech.
