Another short update just to say that I’m now able to hear the following things a whole lot better than I could without the implant:
- High-quality recorded voices. I’m not understanding movies at the theater, but I am understanding movies at ted.com (without the amazing subtitles that site has!) and many other videos that have professional, high-quality audio tracks.
- My family on the phone. I called my dad for his birthday and used webcaptel to fill in the holes. I hardly had to use the captel at all, and generally if I did need it the captionist hadn’t heard him either (i.e. when the phone was breaking up because he moved too far away from it’s base). I made the phone call using an iPhone and my bilateral (bimodal currently) direct input cables for a headset. The iPhone makes it easy to use any headset you need to because plugging one in does not disable the phone’s microphone.
- Mistakes in closed captioning. I’ve been watching a lot of movies on my computer and adding subtitles from SRT files. These are grassroots, volunteer created transcript files and sometimes they’re created by non-english or non-American natives. Many times the subtitles have a phrase that doesn’t quite make sense (“surviving on just toffee is unsatisfying” when it should have been “surviving on tofu” (if you know what movie that is from then you can’t exactly judge me for watching it, can you? :)). These jump out at me visually, but I can easily confirm by hearing what the phrase should have been.
- Strangers on the airplane? I’m not sure if this is easier for me or not because most people on airplanes don’t seem to want to talk. But regardless, I talked to two different people on two of my last flights for pretty much the whole flight. One was very easy to hear and the other was tricky as his voice blended into the engine noise. I may also be understanding more of the loud speaker announcements on the plane, but this varies a lot depending on how bad the sound system is. It also could be due to the fact that I’ve taken off and landed 18 times in the past 3 months… nothing like repetition to improve comprehension.
I was even hearing some of the french in the foreign film we went to see in the theater. It had english subtitles, but I could still, on occasion, hear the french (numbers and short phrases).
Time to find another book on tape and see how much I can get just from listening and how tiring it ends up being. I’ll report back 🙂
