![]() ![]() This all meant I needed to keep switching them, and it was a huge pain to do so. I needed AirPods to do remote work with people far away. ![]() I needed hearing aids to communicate with other nearby people (especially if they were wearing masks) when in the office. Hearing aids helped me hear people nearby. My AirPods Pro were helping me keep in touch with people remotely, but they weren’t doing much for people I was physically near. I finally got my hearing aids as we tentatively started to come back outside from lockdown. They’re not quite as good as the audiogram, but they’re better than nothing. The iPad does have some generic options I can use. The audiogram is stored in Apple Health, which is tied to my iPhone-presumably where my iPad can’t get to it. It also has Hearing Accommodations, but it can’t use my audiogram. But I wish I could have that processing on the Mac, too. It’s still an improvement to have the AirPods over speakers and a mic, just because the AirPods speakers are so much closer to my eardrum. The AirPods still improved the sound around me, but audio from the Mac itself was the same as it ever was. Unfortunately, when I switched to my Mac, I lost that edge. I found I didn’t need quite so much volume because the better sound profile made things much clearer. New stuff I’d grown to love had a whole new dimension I’d never heard.Ĭalls on my iPhone, whether through the good old public telephone network or any other service, also improved. Old music I used to love came back with a clarity I’d been missing for years. I didn’t even realize what I’d been slowly losing over the years to the hearing loss I was barely aware of. Four to six hours can’t stack up to more than 24.ĪirPods do a great job with music, though (as you might expect). The battery life wasn’t anywhere near as good as you can get out of a hearing aid, either. I could hear noises around my apartment much more clearly than I’d heard before, but it wasn’t doing much for conversations. I wondered if this might mean I could use my AirPods as hearing aids. I hadn’t bought my hearing aids yet at this point and hadn’t had a hearing test in a while. The AirPods do this on-device it happens with almost no latency. With AirPods Pro, it can also apply the same adjustments to ambient audio coming in with Transparency Mode. This feature, available for several Apple headphones, can adjust the audio coming from phone calls or media to accommodate various kinds of hearing loss. The feature uses their built-in mics to let the outside audio in, so you can hear what’s going on around you.īut then, during my hearing loss journey, iOS 14 came along and introduced an intriguing new accessibility feature called Headphone Accommodations. This effectively runs the noise cancellation in reverse. They also have a feature called Transparency Mode. I originally got my AirPods Pro for listening to music on a noisy bus with their built-in noise cancellation. But I have something else in my bag: AirPods Pro and AirPods Max. They’re not helpful in the world of work that’s so often remote. My hearing aids are specifically for helping me with day-to-day, real-life conversations. ![]() But the sound is really thin and rather quiet and could never stand up to a noisy room. I can, technically, listen to music from my iPhone or take a call using them. They also have some really basic Bluetooth functionality. I can also select between several different modes that are designed to amplify sound uniquely for situations like crowded rooms, listening to music, and being outdoors. I can tweak their equalization or amplification. They came with an app for my iPhone that lets me adjust them. These are designed to help me out in normal conversational situations like being in the same room with someone. I wear lower-end hearing aids now, tuned by audiologists. ![]() With this kind of hearing loss, I have the most trouble hearing sounds like “th” and “s” and sometimes “f.” Like many people who get help with their hearing loss, I got checked out when people close to me noted that I was misinterpreting them or asking them to repeat themselves often. An audiologist asks the person being tested if they can hear the tones. Audiograms like this one are measured using carefully calibrated equipment, which plays tones at varying loudnesses. The x scale is hertz, the frequency of a pure tone. The y scale on this graph is dBHL, or decibels hearing loss. High-frequency hearing loss is sometimes called “ski-slope” hearing loss, because when plotted as an audiogram, it looks a bit like a mountain you can ski down. But I’ve had some luck making it work in my day-to-day work and life, and AirPods have been a helpful tool. Unfortunately, as many folks with disabilities experience, the world isn’t engineered for me. This common type of hearing loss makes the world sound muffled and can make it difficult to pick up on what people are saying. ![]()
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