Photo courtesy of ABC Family
Yesterday, I watched the first episode of Switched at Birth, This Is Not A Pipe, and the latest episode, Protect Me From What I Want. I watched both episodes because I wanted to see if any similarities have remained consistent throughout the two seasons.
While it’s obvious the storyline has remained consistent, I want to make note of one issue that I have with the show as a person with hearing loss: the notion that lip-reading has been made out to be something that can be done very easily on a very regular basis with varying episodes.
I think back to my own personal experiences growing up, and most particularly to what I experienced last week while at a conference in Las Vegas where I found myself sometimes alone and without an interpreter.
While I have minimal gripes with the organization hosting the event (they ensured I had two interpreters for every presentation during the conference), I was left without an interpreter during one of the evening events.
I usually rely on my residual hearing and lip-reading abilities to understand hearing people when they talk to me. While this doesn’t always work, I’ve been generally successful in environments that were quiet with minimal background noises and sufficient lighting.
However, I was in a situation where it was loud and dark.
Essentially, I had two factors working against me: I couldn’t hear AND couldn’t lip-read.
This begs the question of how Daphne can understand just about everything that is being said on the show.
People often have the misconception that deaf people can lip-read efficiently. However, research reminds me that hearing people are better lip-readers than deaf people, partially because the mouth movement is innate to them as they need to know particular movements of the mouth to be able to enunciate words.
With this in mind, my concern is that with each showing of Switched at Birth, the show is actually perpetuating the myth that lip-reading can be done in a wide range of settings when in actuality it cannot always be done.
Research shows approximately 30 to 35% of words in the English language can be lip-read. The rest of the words are up to the lip-reader to try and put together. That’s a lot of work for a lip-reader when they often already have multiple factors working together against them.
Back to my quick story about my conference in Las Vegas – I attended the evening event for two reasons: food and a free drawing for some cool door prizes.
While I was hoping there would be sufficient lighting, I knew that because the event was in Las Vegas, there would probably be ambient lighting and music. My gut was right, and I spent most of the party checking e-mails and chatting with friends on my phone.
I didn’t want to “work” to understand my hearing counterparts, especially after watching an interpreter all day during the conference. My eyes were already tired enough.
With all of this said, not being singled out for my hearing loss is one of the main reasons I enjoy working for Purple Communications. I’m considered as being the norm, and by the norm, I’m talking about being an employee.
Purple has a wonderful mix of people – we have deaf and hearing, as well as people of multiple backgrounds and ethnicities. It’s a working environment in which we embrace cultural differences.
Like my coworkers at Purple, I hope as Switched at Birth progresses, the characters will embrace these differences, respecting and learning from each other along the way.
Purple Digital Media Coordinator Corey Axelrod is a regular contributor to the Purple Blog. Watch for more reviews as Switched at Birth season two continues! Corey’s views and opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Purple Communications. Follow Corey on Twitter @coreyaxelrod.
Since the focus of this week’s blog is focused on lip-reading and so forth, I will follow Corey’s lead and share my experience. I can tell you lip reading is very difficult. As someone with a db of over 100 and considered profoundly deaf, my residual hearing is minimal at best. I can tell you it’s a lot easier lip reading someone you know very well and how they mouth their words or enunciate, etc. I can reasonably assume that the same would go for Corey as well. But of course when a place is loud, I can’t use my residual hearing to compensate for any missed words. A typical deaf person may only catch 1/2 or perhaps 75% of what is said when applying residual hearing combined with lip reading. Which means we will miss maybe 1/2 or 25% of any communication stated.
As someone who works in a hotel, I have to check in a lot of people, handle requests in person and try to understand a wide variety of people. It’s a given I will have trouble with certain people and those people tend to be those with accents since I do not have great experience understanding those people to which I may resort to the pen and paper route.
What is interesting is Katie Leclerc who plays Daphne has Meniere’s disease which causes loss of hearing and so forth. From what I can tell from watching the show is that she is not profoundly deaf. Without knowing her, I’d put her deafness in the severe range to which her residual hearing is far greater than mine. I have plenty of friends with that level of hearing loss to have an understanding of how well they hear in certain environments. The crux of my argument is the fact she has never said “What” or have asked people to repeat themselves which is something I do a lot of times, and I’m sure Corey does as well with certain people. While it is certainly not fair to shed Katie in this light, I think the producers/writers didn’t pay particular attention to detail on this subject to make a fair sense of what its like to be deaf in environments like what Corey was subjected to in Las Vegas.
I think it would be appropriate for the writers to take a look at this but I won’t expect them too.
I have agreed with your post on this regarding the lip-reading.
As stated, I was starting to dislike the show because of the lip-reading that the character, Daphne has with the people. It is really impossible to be so perfect at lip-reading and understand everything. At least I know nobody is perfect at reading-lips, including myself because I work at hearing environment and I am not perfect at understand everything and had to double check several times.
I liked one scene from other episode where Daphne misread or did not understand one word out of Wilke’s mouth, and asked for clear up. That point showed that we always have that problem where we asked for repeat to get it right… I do not see that happen again ever since.
At one point, surprises me that she can read-lips at night with less lights, like inside the car, or outside at night, which is even more difficult for any one (including me).
As the show goes through, I am starting to see that the Daphne is pretty strong hard of hearing or really close to being a hearing. Probably that helps her to understand the conversation with her friends, or people at school, although the background noise can infer her.
At the same time, I asked the hearing friends of mine who does watch the show, said her speech is not close to perfection, but it is understandable because of Katie Leclerc’s history, (she turned deaf at 20, and has the ability to speak well.)
I agree with Corey. I was born deaf. I was raised with wearing hearing aid in both ears and have training in lipreading throughout my grade school years. As I am a senior citizen my hearing as gotten worse even with hearing aid. It get more difficult reading lips these days. Luckily I learned to sign language at age 30. That a big plus. There are time when I don’t even understand the intreperter as they use ASL. My sign language was English as I grew up in the hearing world. So there will be time when I don’t understand anything and that frustruated. Seems like I don’t fix anywhere. But tried to make the best of it. I can still “hear” with my eyes. Thanks for sharing your story as I don’t feel quite alone.
Justin,
You bring up some very valid points in your response. Lipreading is not an exact science and is something that all deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals need to work very hard at regardless of residual hearing. One thing I do want to note is that Daphne has implied on occasion that she had a hard time understanding people. Do note that the show’s focus is on entertaining as opposed to educating. If you take out the entertaining factor, you lose advertising dollars. It’s all about generating revenue.
Nonetheless, I do hope that the writers and producers are sensitive to these issues and take these thoughts into consideration.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
Corey Axelrod
Purple Communications – Digital Marketing Coordinator
Issac,
I believe you are correct in the assumption that Katie does have a fair amount of residual hearing, and this may negatively impact her ability to play a profoundly deaf individual. I say this especially as Katie plays the role of a profoundly deaf girl in Daphne who lost her hearing at a very young age. However, I will give ABC Family credit in which they chose a young lady who had a hearing loss as opposed to one who did not. I just wish they did not portray Daphne as being a deaf individual, but one that is hard-of-hearing and has some residual hearing. If they could portray Emmett’s father’s girlfriend as being hard-of-hearing, why couldn’t they do the same for Daphne?
Corey Axelrod
Purple Communications – Digital Marketing Coordinator
Donald,
I’m glad you don’t feel alone – the more and more I write for the Purple Communications blog, the more I see that there are other people who share the same experiences that we as deaf and hard-of-hearing people do. These are both good and challenging things, and it’s always helpful to identify with others who have gone through similar things that we have.
Thank you for reading my post – I look forward to reading your comments in future blog posts.
Thank you,
Corey Axelrod
Purple Communications – Digital Marketing Coordinator