Hearing Informed

The best way to describe Comedy Central’s captioning of  the Daily Show with Jon Stewart (one of my most favorite shows on TV) is: crappy and useless. Who’s at fault for this? It’s a rather opaque chain of command involved with this problem. I’m already aware that many producers out there aren’t involved with captioning or subtitling of their shows- that’s a piece that gets lobbed on in a post-production process- often by some third party organization. The producers and writers of the Daily Show ought to realize that the captioning of their show is awful enough that no seriously hearing impaired person is laughing when they watch the comedic show. This means that many thousands of people either change the channel or they sit through the broadcast with blank stares and get little out of the show. Why? First of all, comedy requires good timing –the rhythm of delivery is important to the comedic flair of people like Jon Stewart, Samantha Bee, and carefully edited bits from Fox News. All timing and rhythm is lost in the captioning of the show. A punch line hits and the partially jumbled text from the joke arrives about five to ten seconds later. I’m now listening to something that has nothing to do with the text on the screen- a complete mismatch! My solution? I turn the captioning off because its pointless, and I turn the tv and my hearing aid up. I can handle this because my hearing is just good enough- but I do miss a key word here and there- and I don’t end up laughing because I missed what was funny. I find this extremely frustrating – I have a right to captioning that’s done competently and correctly.

The Daily Show isn’t the only show out there with terrible captioning. South Park (also on comedy central) has terrible captioning- so do enummerable shows out there on other networks. The captions arrive late and end up garbled or wrong. Captioning as a whole is in a dismal state of disrepair. I can’t even use captioning anymore. When friends that are watching the TV with me aren’t used to captioning, they end up flabbergasted and laught and sarcastically repeat the jumbled mess on the screen. They look at me like: what the fuck was that? That didn’t make any sense! … my attitude isn’t one of surprise and I’ve seen the mess on the screen so often that I’m jaded and a little too complacent.

I thought I might solve the problem by going on Hulu.com, a service presented by Fox and NBC that offers streaming video of their TV shows, and watching the the shows (the select few that have captioning online) online. I was wrong. The captioning on hulu.com presents the same crappola captioning that you can find on broadcast tv.

I think people who use captioning end up frustrated like myself. But we don’t complain enough or write the networks with those complaints. Its fairly obvious why: its 10 or 11 o’clock at night, we are tired after a long day, and were sitting on the couch doing the modern American thing of relaxing by watching TV, and we aren’t about to get up off the couch and fire off a letter. Maybe that can change:

You can find information about how to file an effective closed captioning complaint here

I complained directly to Comedy Central here: http://www.comedycentral.com/help/questionsCC.jhtml

Hello my readers, please turn your attention to a poll that I have in the lower right side of my blog. Let me know if you have health insurance, whether that coverage extends to your hearing aids or not (or partially). I think this is valuable information for all of us to see out in the open. This shouldn’t be secret information that executives hand back on forth on their private jets on the way to a hunting trip in southern England. I want this kind of information to be in OUR hands, that of the hard of hearing community or whatever we want to call ourselves. Bottom line, we are getting duped so lets do something.

I would like the comment area of this post to be where you let people know the specifics (only to the extent you are comfortable sharing that information):

If you would rather send me the information personally and keep it private that way you can contact me on the contact page or at dsigismund@gmail.com (I will not give your information to anyone)

Do you have health insurance? If you do, is it a private or corporate type of coverage? military or veterans insurance? or are you covered by a public assistance program (like Medicaid, Medicare, Early Intervention, Vocational Rehab, or Other State Assistance Program) ?

Does the coverage extend to completely managed care- that of a professional audiologists who tests your hearing and fits the aids?

Did you buy hearing your hearing aids through an online retailer or place like ebay?

Did you decide to purchase just one hearing aid, when you really needed two, or did you completely forego purchasing hearing aids at any time because of costs invovled?

Are you happy with your hearing aids and the services provided to you to fit them?

Let me know anything else you want to let people know.

I’ll post a comment as an example.. Thanks for your participation

A stream of thoughts about my Widex Passion Hearing Aids:

The name is a tad cheese. I’d like to meet the people that come up with these names. Is the name intended to invoke steamy images from the uncensored version of One Thousand and One Nights?

Incredibly small hearing aids. This is a plus and a minus. So small no one sees them- maybe I like that but now people don’t know I’m wearing hearing aids…They can’t look at my ears and explain away behavior that seems odd otherwise.

Partly attributed to their small size- the filters on these hearing aids get easily clogged up with wax. Its not unusual for the wax buildup to completely block the sound from the speaker in the ear. I keep a small brush handy.

They are so light I can’t feel them in my ears. There have been a few times where the aids were dangling precariously off the side of my ear. I fixed that problem with custom molds.

Custom molds are a must. I absolutely hate the little nubs that come with the aids. If one is going to spend $6,000 dollars for a pair of hearing aids, why fit them with a stupid little pair of nubs that don’t fit the contour of ones ear? Spend $50 dollars more, a whopping 1% of the price of the hearing aid. The custom molds also improve they acoustics ten fold. I think Widex ought to just provide these molds because they are essential to an improved customer experience

They are stronger than they look. The battery compartment looks like a weak point- but its engineered well- if you put too much pressure on the swinging battery door- it will just come off instead of breaking off. The weak point is the speaker (the part that resides inside the ear and helps to allow the behind the ear segment to be as small as it is). Luckily that is an easily replaceable part.

I’ve hiked through a Laotian jungle in sweltering heat- sweating all over these things. The behind the ear segment of the hearing aid did great with that. The speaker inside the ear did not. My audiologist won’t give me an extra speaker to replace for those conditions because it voids the warranty. I would have liked an extra speaker. It kind of annoys me that I tell my audiologist about that problem, ask for backup for a month long trip where I have no access to audiologists, and then the exact thing I was worried about (the speaker part of the hearing aid breaking) happens. I went two weeks without my left hearing aid.

The music mode is awesome. I love playing music on a set of great speakers and listening to the difference between not wearing hearing aids, putting the hearing aid on the mode I use for everyday life, and then switching the hearing aid to music mode. Amazing. I can hear the cymbals ride out and the faint sound of a brush (versus a regular drum stick), richer tones from guitars and basses, and even the lovely hiss of a record. Really makes a difference for my particular hearing loss.

The transpositioning is a deal breaker for me. I might have considered the Oticons over this aid and I didn’t because of this feature. I’ve written about this before..

When I take off my hearing aids (and sometimes I NEED to do this if my ears and hair are very wet for example) and put them in a small pouch- I need to make sure to take the batteries out of the hearing aid which is both inconvenient and expedites the death of the battery. If I leave the batteries in the hearing aids they would feedback and whistle away. My current thought: this is a necessary compromise- if the hearing aid were designed with an on/off switch then the aid would need to be bigger than it is.

I did need to send in an aid once for repair and Widex couldn’t figure out how to fix it promptly. Instead of drawing out the repair time, they sent the hearing aid to a department where they could research the problem my hearing aid had and sent me a brand new one- free of charge. Widex has a reputation for good service and it counts in a situation like that.

Why doesn’t Widex take a stance on the current state of insurance coverage, or I should say, LACK of insurance coverage for hearing aids. They are a fairly large corporation with lobbying power. They say they care about their customers.. and thats sometimes their customers care about. Paying for hearing aids is no joke.

I recently applied for the “best job in the world” sponsored by Tourism Queensland. Maybe you’ve heard already- Tourism Queensland is sponsoring a campaign to find one candidate who will live on the Great Barrier reef in a three bedroom house, frolicking about in the waters, cleaning the pool, and then writing about it. Hard Life. Applicants were asked to send in a 60 second video that shows why they would be the best pick for the best job in the world. Heres my video:

From Swedish.org:

Long-term exposure to loud sounds, such as gunfire or rock music, can cause permanent hearing loss. A 2-month, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of 300 military recruits found daily supplementation with magnesium helped protect the ear from noise-induced damage.  The dosage used in this study was quite small—only 167 milligrams (mg) of magnesium daily—but tests showed that even this amount was sufficient to raise magnesium levels inside cells and apparently protect the ear from damage. Soldiers who received the magnesium were less likely to experience permanent hearing damage than those in the placebo group, and when they did experience hearing damage, it was less severe.

It is not clear how magnesium might protect hearing. Studies in animals suggest that magnesium deficiency can increase the stress on cells involved with hearing and thereby make them more susceptible to damage caused by intense noise.¹ However, human magnesium deficiency is believed to be rare, so it is possible that supplemental magnesium acts in some entirely different way.

At present, only the use of noise-reduction devices (e.g., headsets that block sound) have been proven effective for preventing noise-induced hearing loss, and this study does not indicate that magnesium supplements can replace this tried-and-true approach. However, this study suggests that a safe, low dose of magnesium may add an additional level of protection.

For more information, including dosage and safety issues, see the full magnesium article.

1. Most of my readers access Hearing Informed through Internet Explorer. I think Internet Explorer has got to be one of the lousiest browsers, but I better make sure my site works with the highly dysfunctional browser because my readers use it. Firefox, my preferred browser, comes in at a close second. I wish more users would use that browser because it works better.

2. After the United States, I receive the most number of visits from Denmark. People of Denmark make up whopping 16% of my readership right now. Thank you Denmark. The people of Denmark seem to care about their hard of hearing and deaf communities. They are also host country of Widex, a company that I’ve written about a couple times. I wear Widex Passion Hearing Aids. A significant percentage of readers from Denmark are coming from the Network Location “Widex”.

3. One of my most popular articles right now is titled “Which Hearing Aids do you Wear”. This tells me that I should make an effort to involve my readers in my posts with a greater frequency. Like any community, people want to know what others are doing and learn from them.

4. Another one of my most popular posts is “My Ear Cleaning Story”. This story is written by my friend Jeff Roth and it’s the only post that isn’t written by me. What do I take from this? I think I ought to invite more guests and readers to write posts and I should do the same for other sites.

5. Many of my readers are from the Deaf community. As it stands now I’m not really a part of that community. Being “hard of hearing” is really an altogether different life experience than being Deaf. This is why I was always annoyed, when growing up and visiting my Pediatrician: He always said something along the lines of “Oh, so your Deaf?” while glancing at my chart. I would always answer back, “No, I’m hard of hearing but I can hear you.” There’s an important delineation there. What do I take away from this? I need to reach out to the Deaf community and learn from them.

Night Watch, the Russian horror film that outgrossed Spider-Man 2 and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King at the Russian box office, is available to US audiences in a sleek DVD version that includes cutting edge graphically designed subtitles. The subtitles are downright startling, artful, and stylish. The subtitles dance with the action, gracefully wavering and sliding about the screen and becoming a part of the movie instead of being slapped to the bottom of the screen as an afterthought. When Co-writer and director Timur Bekmambetov realized that his movie would have subtitles, he set out to be a part of the process of designing them and integrating them into the movie.The DVD I received from Netflix is double sided- one side has the typical and boring subtitles and the other has the “theatrical animated” ones. Check out a clip that shows you the glaring difference.

There’s a great article in this months New York Magazine about a woman named Rebecca Alexander who is staring down Ushers syndrome. Ushers syndrome robs one of their sight and hearing. Thanks to Cochbla for bringing this to my attention.

There are several websites that enable you to test your own hearing. One of my favorites is the one available from The University of New South Wales website- its fairly easy to use and tests a frequency range of 30hz to 16hz. That’s wider than your computer speakers will work so you’ll need a nice pair of headphones, with good acoustics, that also do a decent job of snuffing out the ambient noise around you. If you calibrate your headphones or speakers for the proper volume (done by someone with relatively normal hearing), you can get an idea of how good your hearing is or not. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of free online tests. I was, however, able to get a tests result that looked somewhat similar to the one my audiologist did.

I like the idea of using an iphone app for testing your hearing [via TUAW.com]. Digital-Acoustics.com has a list of free hearing tests your can take along with a paid one.

I like the idea of being able to test my own hearing- I can switch back and forth between tones that are just at the threshold of perception. I find that if I concentrate hard enough I can hear tones that are 3 decibels less than a test would say I could.

About a month ago I was about to cancel my Netflix subscription because I was feeling that I needed to make some serious budget cuts in light of making less money than usual last month and the fact that I went months without renting a movie. My decision was delayed when Netflix started offering their streaming movies for free. There was one caveat- there was no closed captioning on any streaming movies. This was a disapointment to say the least. Half the reason that I rent movies is that I know I’m getting a fuller more comprehensive movie watching experience when I can get every word from the script via captioning into my other working sense- vision.

So of course, I write this blog where I discuss these sorts of issues and I went to investigate the situation. First of all, Netflix has a pretty good blog and Neil Hunt, the chief product officer at Netflix, gave a fluent rundown on the technical background of their encoding. In that post, Neil mentions that as far as subtitles, closed captioning, and alternative soundtracks go… “these features are desired for future releases. Delivering closed-captions via the Silverlight player is probably closest, but it won’t be 2008 either.” Not much information to gleam from that- except that its possibly high on their priority list.

The more I think about closed captioning the more I realize that its important to me and it enriches my experience when it comes to the art of movie making. I’m sure other folks out there, who have a hearing impairment, speak english as second language, or just enjoy subtitles for whatever reasons, feel the same way as I do. Its in our best interest to let the people in high places that are in charge of these sorts of things know that.

Sometimes I wonder if the hearing impaired community itself will have to step up to the plate – particularly the technically inclined ones- and make our own solutions with the technology thats available…more on that later.

Contact Netflix and let them know what YOU think:

call 866-7160-0414
or write customerservice@netflix.com

See a discussion on Netflix blog about closed captioning for Roku device

Another good discussion here on a “timetable for captioning on Roku device”

A brief post on the site Hacking Netflix and an ensuing discussion of CC

Heres a link to a deaf customer that wrote Netflix about these issues

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