Is hearing impairment a disability?

Well I am a veteran and get my hearing aids from the Veterans Administration and the VA classifies me as 50% disabled. It means that I get all of my medical needs taken care of, including my hearing aids and all things possible to help me understand speech. I also get monetary support.

I work in Regulatry affairs for medical devices. In Europe hearing aids are medical devices because they compensate for a disability.

Else they would only be seen as medical devices if they alleviated a specific disease that would cause hearing impairment.

I do not know by heart what the US definition is exactly.

I do not believe my loss qualifies as a disability.

I can hear without my aids if someone speaks up. It’s a pain yes.

I too can hear a lot of different sounds and I can even hear a person or persons talking but I can’t understand what is being said. So yes I am convinced I have a disability. But it took my present audiologist to finally convince me.

For me, it’s not. I can’t hear above 6000 in one ear, those are profound. A hearing aid in that ear does help me a lot with the mild to severe loss. Without the hearing aid, I am at a real disadvantage compared to normal hearing people. I have to work much harder to decode the words, and that takes away from my energy to make connections and think about what I am hearing. I am able to do it in a lot of situations, and I’ve been doing it for a long time. But it is exhausting and not relaxing, and I’m tired of it. i guess it would be like needing glasses to be able to read the words around you, and not wearing them. That would be a disability, but with the glasses, it’s not.

Zeeza, yes, the word impairment means the same as disability. I do have a hearing impairment, but with technology, it’s not a disability. It is true that there are some very soft environmental sounds that I still miss, even with hearing aids, like hearing someone walk up behind me, or the sound of my shoelaces flapping when they are untied. If I go without hearing aids, and then I really can’t function effectively in noise on the job, or even be aware of someone calling me on my right side, I guess that would be a disability. But, if I have hearing aids and don’t wear them, it’s my fault.

Disability just means you’re blocked from the “ordinary” way of doing things. That’s all. It’s not insulting, it doesn’t mean you are in some way deficient, it only means you sometimes follow a different drummer. I am profoundly deaf in both ears, blind in one eye, and have low vision in the other. I also have cochlear implants and a variety of glasses, and some spectacularly helpful software.

Especially with today’s technologies, you can often find a different way to do what you want to. So if you find a work-around, do you still have a disability?

Who knows. Ask yourself why it might matter to you.

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I have been wearing aids for 20 years. I even advanced in my career and changed jobs. I retired as an IT professional with Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer Master level. You can be disabled and if you are dedicated and determined you can do better than anyone without disabilities. Being disabled in certain cases even has it’s advantages.

In Dutch (my mother tongue) it is no longer PC to say “handicap” or “disability” (for anything), you are supposed to say “restriction” (which sounds idiotic in any language). It is a common trend to shift designations as soon as someone uses (or the victim considers) the term as an insult, in a never-ending game. Another example is the series of words we had for a dark-skinned person (ending up with today’s horrible “African-American”, as if such a person does not quite belong in the country). This is a pretty ridiculous situation. Of course being hearing-impaired is a disability and a handicap. Just call a cow a cow, please.

Disability just means you’re blocked from the “ordinary” way of doing things. That’s all. Especially with today’s technologies, a hearing aid being a good example, you can often find a different way to do what you want to.

Until we get self-driving cars, I’m still blocked from driving. Until we get magic or I get enough $$ for a Roger device, I still can’t really sit at a table full of people and join in the conversation.

Etc,

To help us decide what to call ourselves, if not “disabled” or “handicapped”, we might look at how disadvantaged countries were/are called over the years.

See, in the very old days those were simply (1) “Poor” countries, but some would find that insulting. So, in the 1950s people came up with (2) “Third-World countries”, which originally referred to those that were not part of the rich West, nor in the Soviet bloc. That rapidly became awkward, with, e.g., “Soviet” Cuba sinking into deeper poverty by the day, while some nonaligned Arab and Asian countries became filthy rich. So then came (3) “Developing” countries. But that became a cruel joke, as most of these appeared to keep “developing” into the wrong direction. How about (4) “Low-income” countries? Well, nice and formal, but who wants to be in that sh*thole category? The modern, PC approach is to lump two categories together: today it is (5) “Low- and Middle-income” countries, introducing a bit of willful ambiguity.
I am not making all this nonsense up, drafted public policy documents for NGOs for a while.

Sooooo- taking all this as an example, perhaps we can demand that we are referred to as “perfect and slightly less perfect” individuals?

As someone who works in government policy I can see how well intentioned NGOs arrived at those positions. Equally my inner policy geek likes your phrasing too but, like all good government policy lines…it doesn’t trip off the tongue.

I wouldn’t call myself disabled because it’s a loaded term, at least here in the UK. All the nice adverts about ‘not every disability is visible’ are great but…disabled remains a pejorative term. I travel for work and use my Disabled Persons Railcard (discounted rail travel) and I’ve had ‘looks’ for appearing ‘able bodied’.

I wouldn’t define myself as disabled, but usually say HoH. Which able bodied people can just about ‘get‘ and then talk loudly at you.