They are regular hearing aids that are specially programmed by a knowledgeable audiologist to enhance speech while making loud sounds quieter and reducing background noise. Most hearing aids do! However, low-gain hearing aids can be used to enhance the sounds that make words easier to distinguish-without making EVERYTHING louder. Why Hearing Aids? Don’t They Just Make Sounds Louder? I also experience auditory pain, especially in response to some high frequencies, and find multiple or complex sounds disorienting (simultaneous conversations, busy spaces). It takes longer, and it’s difficult for me to participate in conversations-especially when there’s background noise-because processing takes up time I need to plan my response. Naomi: Auditory processing wears me down. I avoided any media without captions, and had trouble following audiobooks and using the phone.Īnother huge issue for me was the fatigue of auditory processing and the difficulty of focusing on auditory input, even in circumstances when I did hear someone correctly. Our Experiences With Auditory Processing IssuesĮndever*: Before hearing aids I was missing a lot of pieces of conversations with friends, especially in background noise. Understanding other people is harder and more tiring, and it takes up time and energy that we need to come up with responses at the speed others expect. In this article, we use “auditory processing disorder” and “auditory processing issues / problems / difficulties” interchangeably, partially for that reason.Īuditory processing issues impact interactions at work, school, home, and out in the community. It’s difficult to find providers who know how to test for auditory processing disorders effectively, and many people with diagnosable auditory processing problems (which include many autistic people) never receive a diagnosis or accommodations. They check for ability to hear words in a quiet environment but usually don’t check for difficulty hearing sentences in background noise, understanding rapid speech, or other tasks that are difficult for people with auditory processing issues. Standard hearing tests rarely detect auditory processing problems. (You can read some discussion in this Twitter thread on overlap between the APD and hard-of-hearing communities.) Others have normal hearing, but because of auditory processing difficulties, have experiences that overlap with those of d/Deaf/hard-of-hearing people. Some people with auditory processing disorders are also d/Deaf or hard-of-hearing. When someone’s brain can’t effectively process sounds, it can make it very difficult to understand spoken words, especially when there’s background noise!Īuditory processing disorders are more common in some neurodivergent people-for example, autistic people-although non-autistic people can have auditory processing disorders too. What are auditory processing issues?Īuditory processing refers to how our brains make sense of the sounds we hear. For us, those include hearing aids, but this is not true of everyone. The authors of this post both strongly believe that d/Deaf/hard-of-hearing people and/or disabled people deserve to be able to choose which accessibility options we use, and when. Although we sometimes have overlapping experiences, there are ways our experiences often differ, and we can’t speak for other people. We also caution readers against generalizing our experiences with hearing aids to those of d/Deaf/hard-of-hearing people, including those who also have an auditory processing disorder. Our experiences may not generalize to any other individual person with auditory processing difficulties. This article describes our experiences as two specific people with auditory processing difficulties who are otherwise hearing. In this post, we give background on auditory processing issues and hearing aids, and also share our personal experiences.The authors of this post both tried specially programmed hearing aids to help with auditory processing issues and with sound sensitivity.Many autistic people have auditory processing problems, as do some non-autistic people. It’s like your brain has difficulty hearing correctly. Auditory processing problems make it difficult to understand spoken words, especially when there’s background noise.They work by enhancing the sounds that help people understand spoken words. Specially programmed low-gain hearing aids can help people with auditory processing problems, even when they don’t have other difficulty hearing.
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