A word from the board

IFHOHYP in times of corona

Dear Members,

Maybe you have already wondered about what is going on in IFHOHYP during the last weeks of the corona pandemic. The situation is challenging for all of us. Staying at home, working/studying remotely, coping with anxiety and loneliness are problems that everyone might face now. But we, the IFHOHYP board, think that the situation can be exceptionally challenging for hard of hearing people. Especially our president Bowen (see article below), who is working as a school teacher, is engaged in adapting new ways of distance communication to our needs. For example, he is in contact with palantypists to test online speech-to-text translation. If you have troubles here and need advice, contact us! OOOR have a look at the manual below that describes simple steps for teachers to improve the online learning/meeting experience for us HoH young people. 
Numerous events, conferences and festivals have been cancelled due to the corona outbreak and HoH events are affected as well. The infamous Sencity festival, a HoH/Deaf music and fair event in the Netherlands, has been replaced by an online quarantine show. The IFHOH world congress in Budapest was postponed until next year. In that course, you might wonder what is happening with the upcoming IFHOHYP events. IFHOHYP is in close contact to the organisers of IFHOHYP Summercamp The Canadian Hard of Hearing Association as well as the organisers of the next AGM to discuss necessary steps to keep us all safe. Updates about SC2020 and AGM2020 will be published very soon!
In the meantime, stay happy and positive! Yes this is a crisis and yes it's scary. But don't lose hope, we will solve this if we all hold together (from the distance)!

Yours,
Leonie (Board member)

 Under the special circumstances we are living now, schools and universities have switched to online learning. But whoops, how to deal with hearing loss when listening to live stream lectures? Here is some advice from our author Maria to share with your teachers that can make functioning of hard of hearing student 100% more effective (the pamphlet above can be used as a hand out)!

1. Hard of hearing students can use technology like LiveTranscribe, GoogleAssistant’s speech-to-text or SpeechTexter and put the phone close to the speaker. It doesn’t record a video, it’s just a live speech captioning.
2. One person should speak at one time, to make the sound channel clearer.
3. While one person is speaking, the rest of participants could be muted, in order to reduce environmental noise to a minimum (except for instances when we sing ‘happy birthday’ together on the chat :D)
4. Make your mouth frontally visible, please, as lipreading helps me too! Also ensure that there is no light behind you (if someone sits in front of the window, it is harder to read lips).
5. Live transcription is a bit slower than normal speaking (programme needs to proceed speech into text). If you ask me a question, please wait for a moment so I can catch up.
6. From time to time the application can garble the words, that’s why I would like to get an opportunity to ask you if I’ve understood you.
7. The louder and clearer the voice is the better.
8. Maybe you could consider to use a headset with a microphone to talk? At least it looks cool to be a leader of a command centre
9. Another solution is to work with detailed PowerPoint slides that you can upload online or send around via mail after the lecture to enable a repeated reading.
10. There is also a software „textamig“ (Swedish for „text me“) that automatically adds subtitles to pre-recorded video. What if you record our session and provide it to me, then I can add the subtitles with textamig?
11. If the course language is English, then Teams, Zoom and Skype offers the live captioning as well in its options. It’s not 100% effective, but sufficient enough.
12. Don’t hesitate to ask me about something and read aloud the answers, please! We can even write on group chat during classes in case of misunderstanding. I want to be active (unless I’m not well-prepared for the lesson :D)
13. If it doesn’t work well, you can always consider giving me written assignments, queries to answer via e-mail. Or short notes, summaries after each session.
14. And if you want me to watch a video as my homework, please make sure it has captions!

Let’s conquer the world from our homes!

Around the world
The sexy "X" (starring Bowen Tang)

Who is the queen of all sciences? Of course, it is said that this title goes to Math. But does it mean that Math has to be a boring, strict, old Queen with dusty crown and dress from the past centuries? Our #hear2stay team checked this hypothesis during interviewing infamous IFHOHYP president, Bowen Tang, who is a Math teacher! He shared with us his experience from his classes and teaching as hard of hearing person, brought our interviewer close to fainting and last but not least, presented  very interesting ways of showing the Queen from her frivolous, naughty side! If you’re enough brave to face the challenge, then breathe deeply, count to 10 and CLICK here to read the full interview in order to learn why 6 is afraid of 7: https://tinyurl.com/sub4pj9

Moments of HoH

A HoH in isolation