I saw this article about masks causing communication problems for people with hearing loss, and I thought I would pass it on. I expected lip-reading would be a problem, but I hadn’t considered facial expressions, which was a total duh moment. I think this article does a good job of explaining the problem and giving some solutions too. The obvious point is we all need the same basic things from everybody: patience and flexibility.
“For the 466 million deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals worldwide who learned to accommodate a world designed around the hearing, the goalposts we were used to reaching have now moved,” Lacke says. “Accessibility has become even more of an afterthought than before; people like me are being shut out.”