 Okay then there we go. Okay so you need to look for this sign and in this room I know that there's one outside the back door there and see where there's the sign over here as it says maximum occupancy 113 it's weird it's on the backside of that wall so that isn't a very easy place to see that so today I decided to put a sign on the front of the podium so that if somebody didn't know and I'm not perfect sometimes I forget you know or we have other things happening in the meeting and so this time I decided to make a slide that's our first slide here so that at least everybody could see that that that we have that here and there are 10 of them in Rossmore and numerous years ago we participated in Rossmore's health fair which they have every October usually and created a document and I'm going to go get it so you can see it so this is a list of the hearing loops that are in Rossmore and I don't think that Rossmore actually distributes that list and I think it's silly and I would be really open to your feedback about who might you think to ask for that and we'll see if we can advocate for them to have them okay yes we need every oh with assistive listening systems every single person needs to talk into the microphone and it's not that it's for the PA it's for the assistive listening system and thanks Jim you can be you and more Maureen can be runners make sure to turn it on there's that button there simple comment is just whoever does the website have them put it on the website Rossmore website just that is one option my personal experience is that at a certain age demographic a lot of people still aren't really in it really in sync with knowing that websites are these multi-dimensional unbelievable resources for us that make encyclopedias that we grew up with seem like the stone age but they haven't transitioned to that place so it's always valuable for them to you know have something in paper even though it's not green but I'd really welcome talking to you about how we get that to happen that it's on the website because it is not there and I think that they're really missing a big opportunity I actually think it's a huge sales feature for Rossmore to have that over other places so yes an app do you need an app for your hearing loss association do you have to have that on your phone an app okay so I'm going to talk to you a minute because I'm not clear what you're asking me so okay wait no no don't don't give the microphone back because I want to talk to you right wait and then I have I have a second question I have my hearing aids connected to my phone does that make any difference it doesn't no thank you no keep the microphone though because I want to have a conversation with you okay so do you understand the difference between a website and an app no okay thank you okay so a website is different than an app a website is an online resource of a wide ranges of information and I'll probably I'm going to make it try make a joke actually probably everybody except God or including God today has a website so the HLA a Diablo Valley chapter we have a website Rossmore has a website the American Red Cross has a website the IRS has a website your place of worship has a website okay and the way you find those is you open up a search engine and if you use an Apple computer it's probably Safari if you use a PC it's one of the Windows versions Thunderbird Chrome and you just put what you're looking for in the search engine okay so if I went to Google and put on put in HLAA that would come up well if you put HLAA more than likely you're going to get our national organization okay if you put HLAA DV or HLAA Diablo Valley you'll find us all right and I gave you my business card earlier on the back of it is our web address oh okay okay for clearing that up yeah now we didn't clear up what an app is though okay so originally all of the software programs that worked on what we had to begin with which were desktop computers were called applications so the first one we became familiar with were was desktop publishing applications that you could type text like word and things like that well through time here in the last 40 years we've expanded to have cell phones smart cell phones tablets other devices and when Apple embarked on these other devices like the iPad and the iPhone they determined that the operating system which is like the brains right of how their desktop computers worked required too much memory and other things to use with these small devices so they invented a different operating system and for simplicity in this conversation I'm going to say a different memory right a different brain function and when they did that they created what we basically call today apps so on your smartphone when you open it you also probably have the capability of connecting to the web but more than likely you have all kinds of tiles that are pictures of all of these different apps and resources so see can you understand the difference in that okay now there are many apps specifically for people with hearing loss so one of the ones that I would certainly recommend for almost everybody in this room is a captioning app for your telephone and what that does is it's not that it may not be that you need it all the time so I know that oh Alan's trying to I think get me in the picture or something yeah thanks Alan see we take the village to do these things right so almost everybody in this room now knows that I have two very successful cochlear implants and I hear better than I ever dreamed of in my wildest imagination I really didn't remember how much I didn't hear and understand and most of the time when my cell phone connects to via bluetooth with my processors and I'm making a phone call listen I didn't use a telephone for years because I couldn't understand well enough and the captions didn't go fast enough I'm using the phone all the time okay so most of the time I understand well but see people with hearing loss never know when they're going to be able to understand and when they're not so if you don't prepare ahead of time for the time that you can't then it's too late to do anything about it so I make my phone calls all through my app and we have information up here oh let's see if it comes back Alan we lost the um let's see it'll come out when Alan moved the screen my screen for to show me it disconnected the projector so it should come back in a minute there we go okay so I make all of my phone calls through the captioning app all of the calls come back um when somebody calls me they they come up so I'm doing fine and then somebody calls me that I don't know and they have an accent they don't articulate well and then I have a problem with numbers so numbers are really hard for people with hearing loss so because it's there happening I don't have to do anything it's just there for me and hang on just a minute so I contacted Eno Caption recently and asked for some of their publicity pieces at the moment probably the two most predominant companies that do captions for smartphones are Eno Caption who was the first company and the second company is called Sorenson now Sorenson's app for the phone wasn't that great so they bought out the company that had the app that people were gravitating toward other than Eno Caption and that app allowed you to see both sides of the conversation well now Eno Caption has that as well and I just got these cards so I'm going to pass them out so everybody has one or Maureen if somebody would like to do this for me wait a minute you have to talk through a microphone I have a caption phone but the captions do not always relate to what the person is saying there's a lot of mistakes so I mean that's a difficulty for me yeah okay so whose caption phone do you have there are three different major companies oh I'm not sure I'm not sure okay so one of them is caption call and that's the same company that owns that Sorenson it's a Sorenson product and see some of us in this room have been through this from the beginning of when we first got captioned phones and then what you're talking about was really irritating but today it's much much better and I was going to ask you how old your phone is and when was the last time you unplugged it and recycled it actually they actually they sent me a new phone last year because the old phone wasn't working at all but nobody has ever told me to unplug it and plug it in again okay so with major technology that we have it doesn't matter whether it is this phone that we're talking about your television the Comcast box all of these things that we have yeah sometimes get wonky and the solution to fixing that is called recycling or they will download in the background and update and it doesn't and so when you unplug it it recycles lots of times that fixes everything so how often do you do that whenever there's anything that's goofy oh okay and unfortunately recently with Comcast that's been frequently all right okay now if you have the caption call telephone yeah I think it is caption call they have all kinds of additional settings in the menu and I bet you didn't even ever know about the menu okay so when you're and I thought I had a brochure here for that I think I know I bring a brochure for everything right oh yeah okay that's it look like whoops does it look like this yes yes okay so I have a brochure and I asked if it looked like this yes okay so oh here okay so down the side here one of the options is menu yeah when you touch the menu you can change not only the volume of the phone so it defaults you can also change frequencies what does that mean frequencies okay so ignorant about that okay so everybody I'm showing a a sample of an audiogram in the room and I'm assuming that almost everybody I'm looking at who all is here today lots of people have seen an audiogram and are familiar with it but I'm going to continue to speak on it and I'm going to move away you might not be able to see the whole thing I just wanted you to know what was happening so your hearing loss is measured by frequencies and those are so these are high frequencies so this is like birds are here okay and this one is where major conversation is a clicking a clock ticking and this is the volume so within that phone when you go into the menu and I think it's called amplification you have sliders in there and if you're having a little bit of a problem hearing on that phone in a certain frequency you can turn just that for those frequencies up which is different than turning the whole volume up I would definitely encourage you to play with that this phone is also this phone is also bluetooth capable so the way that you paired to your cell phone you can pair to this phone as well okay oh I am so glad I came I'm glad you came too yes Cindy in regards to this this app I'm my hardest thing is when I'm calling a company and they transfer me to a foreign country where someone has a pretty darn heavy accent um does this app understand them it understands the better than I do okay so okay that's a piece now part of coming to hlaa and being with other people with hearing loss is that hopefully we empower each other to do what we need to do that we may not have been familiar with before when I talk on the telephone to people one of the first things that I tell them I'm hard of hearing I need you to speak a little slower and if I don't understand something I'm going to ask you to repeat that so then they're set up so that you know like like we tend to pause differently than people who don't have any hearing problems then they're set up to understand that I by my experience I have people say oh gosh I'm sorry like they could do something about that right or oh thanks for letting me know that generally people are helpful if I got somebody that I really couldn't understand the captions really couldn't understand today I would have no problem very nicely saying gosh you know this isn't really your fault but you have an accent and I'm hard of hearing and I can't understand you can you please connect me to someone who's a native speaker of English and then they may not have had anybody say that to them but what happens is you're expanding this whole thing of the awareness and everything and then if they didn't do that then I write a letter to the company I email them I find who I even find who the executive of that company is a CEO and I write him a letter I mean they can have a they could even have a special customer service for the almost 50 million of us with hearing loss the United States okay okay yep thanks so that whole piece of getting into the place of I have hearing loss you know I need this yeah Jim well I was just going to say that for caption phones my biggest problem are the answering systems you know you call in and they they say okay for English press one for Spanish press two I usually get that far but usually what happens is you get down that menu the captions are too slow and you can't hear what the question was and so by the time you understand what you're supposed to do they've hung up on you because there was no response and so what you end up doing is going through three or four times you keep track of what where you were the last time and you know what the answer you know what the question was you answer that question and then maybe you'll get to the next one and maybe one after that and then you it happens again so you may have to call two or three or four times before you actually navigate through that that call tree to get to who you want to talk to so Jim that's one of the you brought up a whole another reason for the captioned phones you can scroll back in the conversation so when I'm where you are I have the same problem I scroll back in the conversation read what they said for the the numbers read what they said for you know press one for this or whatever that is something that I didn't mention is certainly on this phone and on the other phones they have a voicemail so I hope you're using that for your voicemail and the voicemails captioned the voicemail on your cell phone is captioned if you're using one of the captioning apps so you can read it you can read what people said sending give me an idea a call is coming in and I have the app how will I activate it or is it activated automatically once I have it so originally what happened when they invented these apps that you get a unique new phone number okay well none of us wanted that because we didn't want to give everybody a whole nother new thing and they listened to us so today what you're able to do is you're able to have your regular cell phone number that you're still you've given to everybody and when a call comes in your regular cell phone number forwards the number to your captioning app and then the captioning app shows up and you answer it need to start talking it's pretty smooth pretty smooth um does anybody else have any questions about the the and we were going to talk about telephones today right so california connect was going to be here and I'm assuming that they're stuck somewhere right and we are really lucky in the state of california to have this wonderful program every state does not have this and when I posted our we have a calendar of meetings on the hla national website and so theoretically all of you could attend a meeting anywhere in the united states via zoom on a wide range of topics so when I posted our announcement about this meeting and frequently during the pandemic some of our meetings have been half local people half people all over the united states and it's really exciting when that happens right it your your reach is so broad I had people in other parts of the country contact me and say oh do we have that in our state and unfortunately every state doesn't have that I think almost all of the states in the west have it and so for california connect it's not just hearing loss it's all kinds of sensory disorders it's vision it's if you have something wrong with your throat I think they're five different hearing now like when you think of what the other two are oh it's a hearing speech vision two more okay and so oh memory so the and they want everybody in california to be able to communicate in the way that we're accustomed to which is the telephone so if somebody is having memory problems they have telephones that have great or dexterity you have great big buttons on them and some of the buttons can even have people's pictures on them so if you had your daughter your son those people you just touch their picture you don't even have to and it dials their number the phones that they have for the heart of hearing community at one time I wasn't using the caption phone but I was using their amplified phones and their amplified phones come in different models for different levels of hearing loss so I usually prior pre-pandemic did at least five um outreach events in the community and those were like health fairs and senior things and Lafayette the senior symposium and some of the the pieces of information we have were driven by things that people asked at those events so I had people frequently say oh I tried that phone it didn't work well the phones are made by the level of your hearing loss then the amplification is gauged on the level of your hearing loss so if you got a phone that was for a mild to moderate hearing loss and you had a severe to profound hearing loss of course it's not going to work okay and this company was called Harris Communications and the father retired and his son took over the company and they rebranded and became more modernized and now it's called Deglo and this particular brochure pamphlet was fabulous from them because see here with the phones they listed the level of hearing loss that the particular phones were specially for and in an easy visual place to see that so this transition took place a little bit before the pandemic and I was in communication with them about and we're at the tail end of our guides from the parent company right I said would you please make that again and they said well it's on our list well you know everybody's recovering from the pandemic and all the financial problems and everything that you know everybody had and so I don't know when they're going to do that anytime soon but if you didn't pick one of these up before it's really a great resource for you some of the the devices that they have at CTAP California they rebranded too see they used to be called California Telephone Access Program and then they changed it within the last year to California Connect well I mean I've called them the other name for you know 15 years so it's hard to remember okay so uh-huh this is hopefully today is a conversation right yes I don't see prices is this somehow free through California no no no so this is you just go on their website all the prices are there yeah I missed something you talk about a caption phone so I have an iPhone 13 is there an app to make my phone a caption phone yes and do you also have a landline phone no I don't use a landline phone I just use the cell phone so okay so um caption the clear caption call will also give you a large phone if you don't have a landline today they have a special thing that they do I think there's a card here oh yeah so you could still get their phone as obviously it's bigger to read easier to read here so I'm gonna go ahead and give you this do you want one too uh-huh yeah they've had that for a while well but the the apps for the iPhone which would be most useful for me right because that's where I make 90 okay so um that they do work well they work as well as these caption phones um I think better okay okay and so I have multiples on my phone and I created a folder that I call hearing loss and all of my hearing loss things go into that folder and what I do oh first of all I love technology so even though this for Alan and I and today it's working great right I think for everybody who's it who's online and in the room the captions are going oh but I didn't want that toolbar to show but what can I do here let's see can I hide it ah there that's better okay so um I love technology I love figuring out how to do things and because I like that and because I fiddle with them I'm a really good person to help people because I've done all of it right if you haven't done it you can't do it so you can use eno caption you can use the sorenson olelo and those are my two favorites today and so the difference between them is that uh eno caption you can have on your cell phone you can have on a tablet and you can have on your desktop and at this time sorenson's olelo is only on your smartphone and did you get the brochure um oh I think it's it's on the back in here did you pick this did somebody give you one so on this card that we received from them okay so you can see oh well everybody in the room can see but everybody on zoom I'm holding it up to my um camera so that you can see so it's a setting in the menu to turn on to be able to see both sides of the conversation so it's not on by default um and and it's your option whether you want to turn it on I really like it um I I don't know maybe it's just makes me feel more connected to the other person some people don't like that because see there's more on their screen but I like it so the choice is yours and Jim you have a question yeah I do um I was under the impression and you may or may not be able to straighten me out um I I believe for those who don't have a landline um but want to use a caption phone like that let on a landline that california connect will provide a vio p connection in other words a connection if you have if your house has some sort of internet connection but uh the voice over internet protocol uh they provide that for you uh so that you can plug in your uh your uh your caption phone and have have essentially a landline is that is that right so Jim you know things keep changing my understanding is what you said is not correct but see if Jerry had been here today he could have straightened us out so I'm hoping you know we'll just have him come back but caption call will do that okay okay so okay that's yeah yeah so caption call clear captions and hamilton cap tell were the three original captioning landline phone companies originally you had to have a telephone line and they were not internet based and so the ones that california connect distributes are not internet based uh because they want they didn't want people to have to have an internet then you know that wasn't as accessible to everybody but everybody you can afford to have um the internet today has it and so um the companies caption call hamilton and clear captions all made additional telephones that we can all get for free from them we just have to get certified and that keeps changing too so originally you needed to have your healthcare provider or your hearing healthcare provider certify that you had hearing loss today I think on uh captions call to you just certify that you have hearing loss and the same is true with um uh you know caption on there they just ask you to personally certify so this other option that was really wonderful about our california connect is that they offer accessory items and two of the accessory items are really valuable to us one of them potential is they're no longer providing neck loops at one time they provided neck loops um regular analog net loops they do provide bluetooth neck loops so if you don't have bluetooth hearing aids and you have a telecoil you can see here's another thing the telecoil you're seeing how many things you need that for you can get complimentary of the state a streamer and their streamer is oh maybe i can find it in here um there's oh here it is i think it looks like this i might even be this one it's on the back page this one right here so you can get that from them you pair the device to your phone and it streams to your hearing instrument via telecoil another device that they provide is a hub and this hub comes with a bed shaker and a bed shaker is a round disk that vibrates now the one that they um were distributing was made by home aware and i absolutely loved it and love it and they distribute that because this can alert you to when your telephone is ringing an additional alert so what it does is some are we missing one jim does somebody else need one yeah oh you're welcome so they have a oh alan had one can you believe that how great is that thanks so this was the hub that they were um distributing my understanding is they changed companies now this company from my perspective was actually better for us because one of the accessory items for this hub was a smoke and carbon monoxide sensor the one that they have now i actually love it but their sensor is only smoke so then when you're stuck you have some way to figure out how to alert yourself for um and the one that they're distributing now i understand that they have a few of these because um one of our members got one in the last couple weeks and jerry when i talked to him told me he thought that they had 25 or 50 of them so if you think you want one it's time to get it now because the next one won't have the smoke component i mean won't have the carbon monoxide yes ma'am well i was i was wondering if you could ever get an animal a dog uh say that as a support animal because you can't hear is there any such do we have anybody that's ever done that is that possible yeah they're hearing dogs right just like blind dogs they're hearing dogs at you how do you get them designated as hearing no no you have to get them through the companies that are training the dog for those things one of them is canine companions which is in um Santa rosa okay and actually i've been trying to get them to come give a presentation here um can you reserve that um comment and i don't want to direct too much attention to it at this time i can't because i'd like to yes at least share this part but yes there are hearing dogs okay so what california connect has now is called it's on page 16 and it's a signaling system and it's made by a swedish company and the design is super wonderful i mean this one's clunky right this is really slick and modern and the main unit is the piece that you're seeing that's tall like this can you all see that online and they have tons of accessories so they have a baby cry they have a piece that is for your doorbell that they have a mat that you can put on your doorbell outside and when you stand on the mat it signals inside rather than having a piece that you have to replace on the wall okay so that's what they're going to have now and if you weren't so concerned about the carbon monoxide i mean maybe you think that this is wonderful so they will not okay so that's a second okay so there are the phones the neck loops and the alerting device and you can get one of each so your question about the hearing dogs so they're i think like at least five different companies that do that the closest one to us is canine companions and they're in santa rosa and usually in june or something like that they have a graduation ceremony for dogs who are graduating and being given to the people who were selected for that dog to go to and we've taken several you know the chapter has taken trips to go up there so you might want to call them up and ask when graduation is and you might want to go yeah so i'm trying to think of does anybody in our chapter right now have a hearing dog that you can think of yeah yeah they haven't come for a long time oh see alan's not using a microphone he said forest her name is forest frozen ground forest and gym so anyway so the dogs are specifically trained and they're trained so that if this were your dog you'd have to tell people not to pet your dog so the dog is trained to be a service dog it's not the same as a pet dog okay so they calmly sit at your feet they're trained to be able to listen to the sounds to alert you to come get you okay yeah and most of them are pretty big dogs and they're picked for their nature like all the dogs that they have aren't accepted into the program it's fun to go see that so i have some things that i want to make sure everybody gets one oh did they get distributed morning did everybody get one of these or do i have them stuck up here so here they are we have two things coming up one is the walk for hearing and we want i want everybody to make sure to put it on their calendar it's really a wonderful fun event you will be just amazed how many people in the bay area have here so it's this walk for hearing is the whole bay area and so in northern california we have one two three we have four active chapters so there's our chapter there's the east bay chapter there's a chapter in maroon and there's one on the peninsula now our chapter in the east bay chapter lots of us belong to both so i belong to both marine belongs to both jim belongs to both and we go to meetings and not go to meetings and we got some of them we participate on zoom so all of us come together plus everybody else you can have a family team people create t-shirts for everybody in their family to celebrate their child who has hearing loss or to support their grandmother or whoever so i really want to encourage you to come and you can also make a donation to our team and the donations that you make to our team part of it goes to our national organization and we all need an advocate in washington it might to some of us it might seem that we don't it's not really visible what hla does for us but we absolutely need a voice for our government is so what i did was i made this two sided so this side is the walk for hearing and the other side is our hla a convention so we have a convention every year and since the pandemic obviously they've been smaller before the pandemic they were thousands of people to be in a space where there are thousands of people every single workshop space was accessible with the hearing loop the keynote address was accessible with the hearing loop and everything is captioned as well as all three asl captions and a hearing loop so i'd really like and it's in phoenix so it's in our backyard this year and this is the first year in a long time that i won't be a presenter usually i'm a presenter at our national convention so you have these things to have that to think about and look forward to and to know that you really are never alone with hearing loss there are all kinds of us here and you're just lucky to make connection with us at our chapter meetings let's see what else i have here for this the slides oops oh you know that you don't need that so these were the questions before jerry started his presentation that i actually wanted to know so i'd still like to know them how many people in here use an amplified telephone how many people use an amplified oh slow how many people use an amplified telephone okay how many people use a captioning app on your cell phone do you don't use a captioning oh and do you find your captioning telephone and the captioning app on your cell phone helpful okay so so see jerry would have given the presentation in the middle yes uh huh oh yeah ellen this is great you know i was spent last week reading all these things about how to host better hybrid meetings so that the people in the meeting and the people who are on the zoom feel connected you know because it's really easy for people i mean i think it's it's you can't ignore people in the room but it's easy to really not bring people in zoom into our meeting so i'm really happy that somebody asked a question ellen's looking for it you can't find it oh if somebody had a question and they really want to ask that question please look in your menu bar at the bottom of your zoom window and raise your hand because ellen's looking for you and we're going to keep an eye out and just interrupt anytime okay so we do have some announcements so our upcoming meeting and actually in some ways we did part of it today so we have a lot of new people from ross more coming to our meetings and so it felt like we needed to have a meeting about beyond hearing aids you know what's the technology that's available to you to use since the effective range of hearing aids is only six feet so i'm going to give that presentation unless you all think that there's something else that would be more valuable for you and just let me know in may i'm really excited one of our chapter members thought him or say has written a book an autobiographical book and it's called but you look so normal lost and found in a hearing world and her book is going to be released on may 14th you can pre-order it from amazon and so she's going to give us a preview conversation we're gonna have a dialogue about her new book then we have the walk for hearing on the 19th on june 1st we're gonna have a brown bag picnic so before the pandemic historically for no at least five years we had a chapter picnic and people brought something in the chapter provided the main entree and all the beverages and things like that but you know what i'm five years older and i can't do that stuff anymore it's getting harder and harder to do that and with the pandemic we also thought that people aren't really quite comfortable with all those things and so we opted to have call it a brown bag picnic and bring your own whatever you want we're all going to get together it's going to be in rosmore thank goodness it's such a lovely location that we're able to go to um allen what's that actually called up there where it's it's covered under all these trees shady glen it's up by where the bocce ball court is okay so you'll receive more information about that and then our convention is the end of june and phoenix um i'd also like to let you know that in addition to these things that are happening i also am very busy giving presentations in the community i just finished a four session workshop with a renaissance society in sacramento and garrity is hosting these workshops on hearing loss and this is the second in a series of four that we have worked on together one was last spring and this one was this year and they're going to be more and they were four sessions each i've given a presentation to the american red cross i've given a presentation to meals on wheels i'm giving a presentation next week to um the kwanis club this saturday i'm giving a presentation to the st louis chapter the following couple weeks after that i'm giving a presentation to viromant which is a plus 55 community in walnut creek and i've been working with them to get their assistive listening system in order and what happens lots of times is places get them and they never really activate them don't know how to use them it's like i liken it to let's say you decided that you were going to custom build your house right and who hired a contractor they designed it it excuse me an architect they designed it then you had to hire a contractor to build it and the contractor subs out the electrical and plumbing and they put everything there that's required to be there by code but nobody ever tells you what that stuff is so nobody ever tells you that you have a gas shut off valve so i kind of liken it to like that so i've been helping them figure out what they have in their system what they need we're going to get the appropriate signage and i'm going to probably end up giving them the series of three workshops so this place is that whatever work that we do and each one of us does something every time we tell somebody that we have hearing loss we're making the invisible more visible to at least one person that person that you talk to and the numbers of us there are 220 000 people in contra costa county with hearing loss rosmore is a community of 10 000 people i would venture to bet 8 000 of them have hearing loss because the statistic is by age 65 it's one in three of us by 75 it's one in two and at 80 it's supposed to be 90 percent so we're everywhere and everybody's hiding and we're not demanding what we need to be able to function well and they're not hearing from a lot of us to feel the pressure you know when i complain we have other members who have been in rehab who've moved to sniffs where they need a little more help and none of the ones i've been to have the accommodations for what we need i mean they don't even have white boards to communicate you know you really have to ask for them so every time you're doing something like that you're doing it for you you may be doing it for somebody you love who's not where you are right now you're doing it for your grandkids your kids and grandkids so if it's hard to do it for yourself just think about your kids your grandkids and little babies you know babies are born with hearing loss too okay what else do we have here well we're always looking for committee members two of the committees we have one is the programs committee and we help set up what programs we have every month trying to think about what we've had previously who the people are who are attending on zoom we had some more scientific meetings and since we've come back in the beginning of the year we've had really much more basic educational meetings and an advocacy committee and that's me so i'm looking for anybody who wants to join me and as you see today jim was my mouth about other things in the community so and at one time jim didn't do that and so that's a really positive feeling for me and thanks jim so please let me know if you're interested in that or if you're not even interested in maybe doing some of the work with me you may be really interested in learning more about the law because it covers almost everything did anybody ever get communication access when they had to go talk to social security in walnut creek they're required to have that for us the federal government is required to provide us with communication access here's another reminder for the walk for hearing and we have a youtube channel and our youtube channel we have most of our meetings and we're recording this meeting today and you can go back and watch them on on any topic so we have a really rich we have a really really good um recording in our youtube channel about cochlear implants so one of the ci audiologists from ucsf gave us a zoom presentation and it was really really i learned two things from that presentation that i didn't know so i highly recommend that you go take a look at it and the reminder to everybody the law the civil rights law that you may be the most familiar with is the americans with disabilities act and i know that you may have heard of that before but you might not really realize it's a civil rights law it's the same thing as women getting the right to vote it's the same thing as discriminating against people because they're african-american it's a civil rights law and it says that we are to have equal access to people who don't have a disability that means that we can understand things and there to provide auxiliary aids and services for us so that we can do that we have our ask bro shores here to help you understand that a little more what kinds of things and places it should be available and everybody who i think who's on in zoom has already seen this now i have another slide here that depicts the places that you might not think about and i hit it today i don't know why i didn't you know i thought maybe everybody's tired of seeing it so your bank can you understand the bank teller your grocery store your pharmacy your place of worship if you live in california so the ada excluded places of worship but the state of california in our disability rights laws under the unruh act did not exclude anybody so places of worship are covered under the unruh act in california your children's graduation from grade school high school college you go to a presentation at your grandchildren's high school elementary school they're required by law to have communication access in the auditorium so if you didn't know that you might not ask for if i go to my grandson's graduation what do i ask for so that i can hear okay so i'm gonna make an assumption that you would know ahead of time when your grandson was graduating yeah okay i would contact the school ahead of time yeah identify myself i'm hard of hearing i need hearing assistance to understand at the graduation what do you have okay they may say nothing they may act like you know they've got their finger up their nose and deer in the headlights and so that's part of the process and so ideally they would have asl american sign language and just for those of you who aren't familiar with it every country sign language is different there's american sign language french sign language all of these other ones so ours is asl american sign language captions on a jumbotron okay and an assistive listening system okay and so i can remember the first time that i was advocating for communication access at a local event that was specifically for seniors and the first year and we wanted to participate in a booth they gave us a booth information booth for free right i didn't want to have to pay so i was nicer that year the next year i asked them and they didn't have anything the next year i asked they said yeah yeah i asked again i said yeah yeah and i said no i don't think you're understanding they came back the third time and then i said do you realize you're violating all of our civil rights this is a civil rights violation so when jim's talking about it not being easy and it's not maybe what you want the first time i did that i mean it had to be three times and i kept sitting there and going can i do this can i really do this and then they had it every year after that thank you okay might not be easy might take but every time is better and the place we really need work big time and i'd be interested to have some ideas from people is john mere health i'm a member of john mere health i have never once received the communication access that i have needed to easily understand and they even paid me money to give a presentation on hearing loss for their lunch and learn and still nothing i am this far away from a lawsuit and it's because i think that's the only thing that's going to move them i am a member of kaiser and when i go to kaiser often if not always they have masks on my doctor has i love my doctor but he is foreign and he wears the masks and i cannot understand him now not understanding my doctor is not a good thing is there anything i could do about that you can i've advocated at kaiser i went to kaiser oakland's corporate office in 2016 you have the guide from kaiser in the guide it tells you how to get your communicate your health guide book you're how to get your communication access and you go to patient services now the things that they maybe want to give you and you have to see what works for you because the law was rather open allowing us to specify unless it's a room with a public address system what they can provide but i'm thinking the chances are really good that you're not going to understand that person with a pocket talker and i didn't bring one today and you probably need captions so they can provide captions by providing a laptop computer and they have a captioner like we have here who's remote on that computer and they're captioning every single thing that's being said and you can read it they're supposed to provide that and see alan's wonderful this and he i don't know what i do without him this is a pocket talker everybody needs a pocket talker they don't we would hear of oh kaiser has them or kaiser would have them or i would no so every time we bring our own device we relieve them of their legal responsibility they're required to provide i want to hear if doctor if it means i should bring one that means i could hear him you may be able to but what happens if you don't advocate with patient services and you're in an accident and your mate your spouse whatever isn't with you you're in intensive care your mate your spouse whoever you're with got killed and they have no accommodations for you and they're not accustomed to providing them that's what you're giving up you're giving up moving the system forward and i've been with our chapter members now that's something happened to one of our chapter members recently and i'm saying they don't even have a whiteboard but that woke me up to think my husband he doesn't know how all the parts of my devices and everything he doesn't know where i go online with my cochlear implant company this person broke had their device broken their kids didn't know she never thought to tell them and parents don't tell their kids because they don't they want them to think they're not having any problems right so every time that we do that we put ourselves at greater risk for when we might really need it need it i mean really really really need it so kaiser has pocket talkers um you do get them from patient services which is on the top floor it's in your guide about how to do that and did you sign in sign in and next to your name put kaiser and then i'll send you the link to where that is in kaiser thank you okay the other thing that you could do in a pinch is use a speech to text app that's on your smartphone and i couldn't have gotten through the pandemic without it so oh where's my phone so the one that i if you have an android telephone um there's an excellent one that that is for android it's called live transcribe the thing i have an iphone and if you have one of the newer iphones they're starting to do speech to text but their technology and accuracy isn't anywhere near the the apps that have been here for um quite a while and my favorite is ava and let's see if we sometimes it doesn't work in here let me get it going and so um it captions exactly what's oh they went to okay so it's captioning exactly what i'm saying here the microphones are on the bottom they made it so that you can rotate the microphone when the beginning of the pandemic i had my oh for women i have a little purse a phone purse that's a cross body so my cell phone because my speech to text app is on it and also the app for my cochlear implants is on here it's really easy for me to get to all the time i happen to incorporate mine into like a wallet thing um and they make them though that are just really thin only your cell phone and then on the back of it you have a place to put a couple credit cards so you can see how accurate that is okay so in the grocery store i reached my hand out like this i would tell the the cashier i'm heart i'd make it you know oh i'm hard of hearing i'm using a speech to text app and then i'd flip it and show it to them and their mouths would drop because of how cool it is so i i tried my speech to text act here it works a hundred percent but it also turns off my hearing aids it's just some way to keep your hearing aids on while you're using the speech to text app because most of the time i can hear 80 percent and i'm using this for the other 20 and it doesn't work that way no because they're both using the microphone but do you want to know what we've been complaining to ava about that and right today it's captioning me and i'm still hearing in the room so what you were talking about used to happen here but today it didn't happen and something new that happened was as soon as i opened my app i had a little thing that flipped up that was like the bluetooth pairing for my cochlear implants so maybe it's a new feature do you have ava yeah so download ava and try it i'm using listen live which just comes with the iphone yeah so download ava and ava works on your smartphone works on your tablet works on your desktop and i can make this let's see if i can do this right um no no it makes it so that it just becomes a little tiny icon that floats around on your screen and anytime i want to use it i just touch this little button and it starts captioning so we all need this right yes indy the thing you talked about kaiser having that we shouldn't even get how would i how would that be used in the office just give me a little yeah i'll show you okay so this is the microphone and i like to use this microphone with an extension cord so that her doctor is more than you know he's doing on the computer and all this other stuff right so he could have the microphone with what he's doing and because i know at the moment you don't have uh telecoil you'd have to use headphones you plug the headphones into the headphone jack or somebody who had a telecoil you plug a neck loop in here but you're hearing instrument in telecoil and then it streams to that and then they have this has tone control on the side and volume control here now the one that they might have probably isn't this one because this is their newest model and the thing that's really great about this one is that also has a telecoil in so if you didn't have a telecoil uh in your hearing instrument you could take this with you and you wouldn't have to worry about if they had enough devices like we loan out yes ma'am reena reena reena thank you um is that thing really good for driving in the car or is there another thing that you suggest okay my husband can never hear me in the yeah so before i got my cochlear implants i couldn't hear my husband in the car forever until i got ava yeah and i have and this was you know i have a holder that fits right in the vents i put my cell phone in there you can also attach a microphone to your cell phone there's this little white plug that's an adapter that fits in here you could he could give you the um microphone because everything is better the closer it is to the sound we drove to southern california to visit my niece that was the first time i understood what was going on in the car i sat there the whole time just reading everything my husband was saying but the problem is he's often driving he can't be looking well that's a problem i thought maybe that pocket thing maybe that pocket thing that you showed so that's an option the the complication that happens with that is that it also picks up the road noise so as my hearing loss progressed this worked less and i'm not saying don't try it you know when you're in severe profound hearing loss you have to try everything um but for me what happened was i the road noise came up with the volume and i had a hard time but that might not work for you i mean you might not have any problem might be wonderful do you have a telecoil in your hearing aid criminal my hearing aids like oh so yeah well telecoils have been around for 60 years it's not new technology criminal criminal that anybody do that for somebody with spirit of hearing loss when i call are they go and i ask them about the telecoil are they going to charge me extra for putting that into the you can't put it in you can't retrofit your aid oh that's what i'm saying they did you a huge disservice so what you went to them knowledgeable expert for your hearing health care so what can i do the only thing i can do is insist that they give me new hearing aids isn't that i would think of any new way i could convince them about how bad that service is and that you have tons of friends and you experience this now and it's life changing yeah jim just that you often hearing aids have uh telecoils but they're not turned on correct so um that she's already asked yeah yeah i understand but it's just you need to go to your audiologist and and ask them if if they can turn them on they have to turn them on if i have them and they're not turned on they have to turn them on wait a minute earlier i thought you said you had already talked to them oh oh cindy's saying she said that no so you need to take this card yeah to your hearing health care provider okay this card i have this and you need to ask them if you have a telecoil in your hearing instrument now most of the people who've ever come to our meetings before didn't know where they had a telecoil didn't know where they were turned on some have gone and had them turned on and some found out that they didn't so i have been at the audiology convention working the hla a information booth we've been out there talking to people about telecoils what they've got going on about that is beyond my comprehension thank you okay so what it is if you have it built in you have multiple programs that are available for your hearing instrument most hearing instruments today have four slots so that's for four programs the first program is some kind of an automatic thing that's adjusting which you might keep in most of the time a second program could be a special program you had them set up for you to hear in a restaurant or speech in noise you could some people during the pandemic had an extra program from their put in to work with masks so this extra program with masks increased the volume to try and understand better because masks you can lose 20 decibels and a telecoil program now until the last four years you could always have more than one telecoil program in your device the reason you would have more than one was because you could have what was the most common one which is called telecoil plus microphone and the idea behind that is you hear from the system listening system and when Cindy's talking to you she's sitting near you you can understand her this room is quiet when we tested when we piloted hearing loops for Bart and because of our advocacy all of the 755 new Bart cars have hearing loops on them all of the information booths for Bart have hearing loops because of us okay so when we piloted and tested the hearing loops of the platform I happened to have had both at that time in my hearing aids I had a teacoil only program and a teacoil and mic program everybody who had the teacoil and mic program only said it didn't work the hearing loop didn't work because they heard all of the train background noise since I had both I could test both the hearing loop by itself was fabulous since that time it's getting to a place where oh there you go there's there's a floating screen for Ava okay so um since that time most of the hearing aids today or large numbers of them have an app that acts as a remote control for the hearing instrument and one of the options in that app is that you can adjust the teacoil so because I can do that now I don't need to have more than one teacoil if I was someplace there was a lot of background noise and on my app what it does is um I'll pull it up for you so you can see it okay so this button here see how oh everybody hears what the app looks like on there and then I'm going to go into the room so this is the teacoil and here's the surround the other noise right so I can just slide this over now I hear most of the surround and just a little bit of the telecoil from my ci over here I'm all telecoil so when you talk to me if you're not in the microphone for sure I can understand a thing okay so see now I can understand you zero okay so now I'm going to move this back now talk to me okay so get your card out we we designed this card just for you no this card it's okay you can take another one no maybe she doesn't have it Allen it's okay there's one right here so listen I'm on a national committee we spent months coming up with all kinds of pilots and things to create these documents for all of you so that they would answer your question okay now you don't want to give this one to them and the reason why because you've already written on it no it's just fine I'm not snow okay so when you have programs in your devices they have a way that it signals to you that you're changing programs usually it's with beats okay so one beep you press your your one beep is one program you press it again it's two beeps that's a second program you press it again so that's how you can tell if you have an app on your phone you just select which program you want it's usually much easier to use on your phone if you have an app we created this card so that the front are the directions to the audiologist the hearing healthcare provider so you don't have to use the right language this is what they need to know and this side is for you hey I would like to use my telecoils in a hearing loop with the neck loop and or assistive listening device system please write clear instructions on how to use it manually so this space was left blank so they can write in there because when you go to the doctor you go to the healthcare provider it's a lot of stuff we always forget right so you don't have to worry because hopefully they wrote it so that you can understand what they said