Editorial policy with regard to people with a hearing loss who use speech
Our main aim is to supply the reader with as much helpful information as possible.
Our hope is that the reader will feel encouraged and informed enough to take greater control of their lives.
We want the reader to take control at their own pace. Thus we want the reader to try out new steps when they feel ready and not because somebody else is telling them to take the steps.
We want the reader to feel safe and to feel empowered because, as editors, we feel that the reader is the best person to know what is best for them.
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We want you to be reassured about what is not our editorial policy
It is not our aim to tell the reader what to do and it is not our aim to bully the reader. Thus, we will not be telling you to do anything that you do not want to do. Nor will we be telling you are wrong to do certain things – though sometimes we may point out that some strategies may be more useful than others.
We all agree that nobody has the right to tell another human being what to do. For example we will never say to you that you must tell people you are deaf. This is because we believe that it is up to you to decide who it is useful to tell and who it is not useful to tell. Nor will we ever say that you must take control because we believe that you are the person who knows when it is the right time to take control.
With regard to the psychological aspects of deafness we will never tell you to do anything like accept your deafness. We believe that telling other people what to feel is as wrong as telling them what to do. Thus one of our aims is not to make you feel guilty about being deaf or feel guilty about how you deal with your deafness.
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Editorial policy with regard to people who speak to the person with a hearing loss who use speech
We hope to provide you with lots of useful information which we hope that you will use to help people who have a hearing loss. We hope that the information we give you empowers you to do your best to make communication with a deaf person more easeful.
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Who are the editors?
Currently there are there are five of us and the experience and training we have are as follows:
Three people have a hearing loss and all are trained as lipreading teachers.
Our qualifications include: Lipreading teacher training, Audiology Masters, hearing therapy, lipspeaking and note taking.
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How the individual can use this website
1. Adapt the suggestions to your own needs.
2. Remember that what might work person might not might for one work for another.
3. Ignore suggestions which don’t appeal to you.
4. List the ideas you feel will help you in the order of your preference.
5. You can always try one course of action and if that fails try another.
6. Please try not to get depressed if things don’t work out straight away. Please try another strategy. Also, talk over the problem with your lipreading teacher if you are having difficulty finding a solution as they might be able to offer further suggestions or listen to you whilst you develop your own solutions.
7. Several hearing impaired people said that they found that time is a great healer and that they eventually developed a sense of humour in some situations, though not all situations. (Quite a few people said “Laugh and the world laughs with you” and pointed out that many people are very unsympathetic and don’t want to know about the problems of deaf people.) Quite a lot said that they never really laugh they only pretend to.
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How this information was put together
Many of the strategies have come from people who contributed to a converstion strategies competition.
We have tried to include all the strategies and also use the language of the contributors. However, where two contributors had the same idea, or had ideas that seem to go well together, We have put them together. In those cases the language has often had to be altered.
There are many sections where you will find strategies which are rather similar though not exactly the same. We have tried to put in these rather similar strategies because we thought that the different contributions would appeal to different people. Perhaps you feel that this website should be more streamlined, but we feel that hearing impaired people might appreciate a wider choice of ideas and approaches. We would be interested in your ideas about whether you feel it should be streamlined or not.