Loop America

Here's a valuable site telling all about it:

http://www.hearingloop.org/loopAmerica.htm

Briefly, here is the scoop. Any hearing aids large enough to have telecoils inside them should. These help you hear on the phone.

Also, telecoils can be turned on to hear in many, many other places that are "looped." To loop an area, a wire is placed in a circle or loop and attached to a microphone. The mike can be next to TV speakers, at a podium, in a courtroom, theater, drive-through, airport or train station, car or taxi, tour bus, pulpit, cashier's mouth, bank teller's mouth, etc., etc. The hard of hearing person then hears the words spoken directly into his or her ears through hearing aids and can also have all background noise blocked out! This can make the difference between hearing most or all of what is said and hearing almost nothing.

England has almost totally looped itself. A sign indicates when a place is looped, and the person wearing hearing aids only has to push a button on each one to use the loop.

Looping of small areas can cost under $1,000, much less for a TV room (about $200). A large church, seating three hundred, can be looped for under $2,000. This is less than often spent on wheelchair accessibility, and I think it's a crime that this hasn't been mandated and done here in the United States. There are far, far more people with hearing loss than people in wheelchairs!

But people with hearing loss are a silent bunch. As if they are ashamed of their disability. There are a few advocates out there, trying hard to make the world accessible for those with difficulty hearing.

If all the over 30,000 million people with hearing loss would make their voices heard, America would be looped in no time, enjoy open captioned movies and captioning at all public and private meetings and thus be able to enjoy what hearing people take for granted.