 Good morning, everybody. Morning. Good morning. We're unsure this morning if a waiter until a few more people come. There's Katie right waiting to get in. So we had 40 some 40 people sign up for our meeting today. And we've been waiting for our presenter to sign into our waiting room. And she hasn't signed in yet and I emailed her. So I'm just alerting everybody that we don't know what's going on with our presenter and we will just punt. From. What we're going to do about our meeting. So first of all, I'd like to introduce myself. And I'm Ann Thomas and I'm the president of the Diablo Valley chapter. And to make these virtual meetings happen. It takes other people behind the scenes monitoring different pieces. I'd like to introduce our officers. And in order to do that on the officer, you need to say something so that your face. Comes forward for all of the people who are viewing this. So Zoher Chib is our vice president Zoher. Can you say hello. Hello. Hi, welcome to our monthly meeting. And Jill McFadden is our secretary. Jill, you want to say hello. Morning. Everybody. Hello. Well, Bateman is our treasurer. Hello. This is Walt. Hi, Ellen is here. I'm the treasurer. And I just back up what. It's done at the. At. Hi, Ellen. Hands. And Alan could serve. We got the guest speaker right here. Hi, Alan. Hi, Alan. Is our all around tech savvy support person. So Alan, can you say hi. Hi. Who is the tech savvy support person. Alan could Sarah. Oh, Alan. Okay. Well, can you all see me? Okay. Yeah, but Ellen, we do directions first. And then I'll introduce you. Okay. Hi. Hi. No, Alan. The hearing loss thing. I'm just not lip reading. Well, Alan's not, doesn't want to see. And we also have Bob Zastrow, who's the HLA Northern California coordinator here. Bob, can you say hi? Good morning to everybody. Thanks, Bob. Okay. So the first thing we do is that we have directions on how to use zoom. So we know that things are not going back to what we knew them to be at one time. And we want everybody to be up to speed and comfortable with this technology, because we're all predicting that the wonderful opportunities we have to connect with people all over the country are going to happen. So here we go with the directions for viewing zoom on a desktop. If you happen to be using a phone or a tablet, the directions are different. And we don't give those directions for our meetings. We'd like to encourage everybody to use it on a desktop. We're going to be talking about how to activate the captions, full transcript, the chat window, and how to raise your hand for Q&A. So we're going to be talking about how to raise your hand. I imagine with 40 some people, there's no way that you can see everybody raising their hand. So we'd like to ask that you raise your hand to be recognized. So I believe that the captions are all automatically showing for everybody. But if by some chance they're not click on it's now called live transcribe rather than closed caption, but it still has the CC icon in your toolbar. So if you want to show up and you need to, to select what the arrow is pointing to show subtitles. You have an option to increase the size of the font for the captions. I happen to like mine as large as possible. And where that setting is, it's still in the CC setting. It's the bottom option on the secondary window that opens up. When you click on that, an additional window will open up and there's a slider bar. And so when you move the slider bar, you're able to see visually see how big or how small the captions are. You also have the option of viewing the captions in a full transcript to the side of the window. Sometimes this is very valuable because you know, as much as I love the captions that are on the bottom, sometimes I don't realize what I missed until I read the next part of the sentence. And by that time, the part I missed is already gone. So if you have the full transcript open, you're, it's very easy to just scroll back and say, Oh, was that word, that word or those couple words. In the chat window. We'd like to encourage you to open it. It makes it much easier for you to see what other people are saying. And there it says chat. So click on that. And you can move that chat box anywhere you want around your screen. If you click on the subsequent little downward facing carrot. That says chat. And what will happen is something will show up there and it says, pop out. If you click on pop out, you can then drag the chat screen although anywhere you want. There are keyboard shortcuts to be able to change the font size as well in the chat. And for them on the Mac, it's press the command, which is that squiggly piece. Plus. On your keyboard. Or command minus. So command plus makes things get bigger. Command minus makes things get smaller. And if you're not familiar with using these shortcuts on your Mac or your PC, this will work for multiple programs. So you may have learned a keyboard shortcut on the PC. It's control rather than command plus or control minus. We'd like to have you be feel free to use the chat for technical questions or other comments. We'd like that you identify yourself by name, by your chapter, potentially your location, because we're posting all of our meeting announcements on the HLAA leaders list. And so people from all over the country have the opportunity participate in our meetings. And it's nice to see who and where somebody is coming from. We encourage everybody to make sure that they're using the most current version of zoom. But as we all know, we all aren't together at the same time. So there's a new feature in zoom. They changed where the raise the hand feature is. It's now in reactions. And so when you click on reactions, there'll be other other things that you could react to. But the first thing that you see is raise hand. And so when you click on that, you notify the hosts and the co-hosts that you'd like to say something. And what happens is in the upper left hand corner of the thumbnail of your image, a hand goes up. The old location for raise a hand is in participants. And Jill McFadden right now just raised her hand so you could see what that looks like. Was in participants and it was in the bottom of the window. Hopefully nobody has this any longer. And maybe next month we won't even show the old slide. A feature that many people find very helpful is that when you are in the gallery view for the presenter, you get to see the presenter on one side and the screen share, which is a PowerPoint presentation on the other side. If you look closely in the middle of that circle, you'll see three lines that run up and down. If you click on those lines with your mouse, you can drag that screen right and left so you make, you can make the image of the presenter the same size as the PowerPoint presentation, which is really helpful for lip reading, speech reading, which is our topic today. We'd like to encourage everybody to speak a little slower. I don't know if you're like me, but when I get nervous, I tend to speak faster. And by speaking slower, it makes it easier for the other participants to understand us. And it also makes it easier for our wonderful captioner, Corey Dostey, to be able to accurately type the captions. If you have an external microphone, it's probably not convenient to get it for this meeting, but we really encourage you to use an external microphone. It increases the audio clarity for the presenters who are participating in the meeting. So our presentation today is by Ellen Mastman. And the topic is lip reading. Many of us in our chapter have taken lip reading, speech reading from Ellen. At one time she used to teach them as part of the California program in relationship with the acronym is Decara. It's the Deaf Counseling and Referral Agency. And I'm thinking that it was maybe three years that Ellen taught lip reading there. And so some of us went through one whole session, liked them so much and liked seeing each other because it was once a week. We came back for the second and third year. And so many of us know Ellen. And we're really happy to see her. And Ellen, I am turning the meeting over to you. Did somebody make Ellen a co-host? No. Hang on a minute. Let me make you a co-host. So you have to see it. Ellen, you have to accept. I don't see. Let's see where would that be? It should pop up on your side. You know what Ellen, you're already assigned, so it's good. So it's all yours. And I don't know whether you're just going to talk to us, whether you have slides. What would you like to do? I would like to just talk to you if I could. And if you would like to, I like to keep the screen on gallery view. So I can see at least a little bit of each one of you. From what I understand this, do we have 40 people? Is that what you said? 40 people signed up for it. We actually have 25 people have joined us now. Okay. So now this has, oh, there we go view. Everybody sort of skedaddled over to a film strip on the left. I'm going to open the view. If you go away, don't panic. I'll be back. Here we go. That's a way. That did not work. All right. You have someone in the waiting room. I've just let them in. Okay. We have somebody Barbara Dagan who has her hand raised for a question. Barbara, do you have a question before we start? Yes. There we go. Barbara. Would you like to go ahead and ask your question? You'd have to unmute though, Barbara. No, I'm only just press your space bar. That should do it. I'm not that good a lip reader. I think I hear something. No, you're still muted. There. There you go. I'm apologizing. I'm unaware that I did something that raised my hand. I don't have a question yet. We'll, we'll look at, we'll watch out for you then, Barbara. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. All right. Now what I'm going to try and do because for some reason I can't see all of you. This is so very different. There we go. Hi everybody. Ah, perfect. Okay. Can you see me? Is everybody all right with that? Is the lighting okay? Good. I can get farther and closer to my screen, which helps somewhat. But I like to keep an eye on all as many of you as I can. And I guess I do have all of you, which is a relief. Okay. I sent out a handout. To Ann, and I believe she forwarded that to you. Did you, Ann? Oh, you go. Oh, okay. Well, in that case, I'll use it as my outline. And I will ask Ann if she would please forward it on a different, at a different time. Can you do that? Thank you. Okay. Thank you. So what I tried to understand from the communication and is very good at telling me what she wants to hear. If I come to talk to you. And she was quite clear after I got this all written up. That she wanted to know something about why we really should not call this lip reading. This is speech reading. Are you all familiar with that term? You cannot. Yes. Okay. So this is probably all the information for you then. If you are aware of. Speech reading at all. Then you know that there's a lot that we can see as we watch a human being while they are trying to communicate with us. They can't always keep it hidden. Even people standing still like a statue reveal stuff. That helps you understand the communication they're working on. It is important because another handout I sent to Ann, which I think she probably also didn't send out to you. Explains how. Many of the sounds of speech. Are extremely. Difficult to tell apart. And in fact, some of them are identical. They're identical. And the first class of every lip reading quarter, and I have students who've been with me a long time. They keep coming back. They love it. It's fun. But I have to say. We repeat this information every single time. There are groups of speech sounds that look exactly alike. Individual. Like, like the letters of the alphabet phonemes, and they are very difficult to discern. So for that reason, among others, lip reading or speech reading really does not help you 100%. In a communication situation. You know, I'm not going to say that discouraging. Well, if I were to tell you that you had an awful problem because you can't understand people. But I can help you a little bit. By making some things a little clearer. If you watch my face and the movements of my mouth. That would that would be desirable. Is that not right? Well, I'm not going to say that I'm not going to tell you. But I'm not going to say that I'm not going to tell you. I'm not going to tell you. In lip reading class. Speak, I call this. I use the old fashioned term lip reading. And I'm with, with savvy people. I'm always having to explain myself. Lip reading is an old term. When it was believed, you could just watch people's mouth. One mouth, not mouths, I guess. Watch a person talk. actual fact you can't. And the similarity of some sounds, one to another, is one reason that it's not possible to understand everything a person says. There are too many misinterpretations that you will make. Now, speech reading enables you to think about this in a different way. Think about the word speech reading. You're watching not just the mouth. You're watching the muscles in the face. You're watching if you can get a view of it and the lighting is good. I hope you're getting information from watching the tongue inside someone's mouth. There are so many things that you can observe that will support however much your ears are receiving. If you have a horrible, horrible, horrible hearing loss and no cochlear implant to help you out, then it's very possible that you're not hearing much at all to understand speech. But if you are somewhere in between normal hearing and just completely profoundly deaf, some sound is getting in. Only a very small percentage of people receive no sound at all. So if we speech read, we can see clues in the movements of the cheeks and the face and all these other movements that I described the mouth as well as the lips. That's why it's more de rigore to call what we do speech reading. Truth is a lot of people are not sophisticated like members of the hearing loss association. They haven't given it thought one in their whole life. So to them lip reading is a familiar term. So as much as I'd like to say I'm just a humble college instructor, I do have to think about marketing. How else will you know anything of what we offer? And that and Thomas is why I use the word lip reading. So you'll have to forgive me. It is definitely speech reading. There definitely is information besides the way the lips move. One of the ways that speech reading helps, I'm just going to go through a list of ways in which speech reading can help you. The first thing that it can do is it can fill in some some of the blanks. So when you have a partial loss of hearing, partial loss of hearing, your awareness of what is being said is only maybe half or a quarter of what someone is trying to say to you. And it takes both of you working together, communicating to get the message to go from this person to this person. And then as the message goes across, if there's hearing loss, everybody's hearing loss eliminates a different combination of sounds. Speech reading helps you because you can watch me talk. And if you heard, for example, and a word that starts with M, but my lips didn't close, then you know, oops, it wasn't an M. Now, if after a number of years of doing this, you come to be able to sort out which sounds sound alike. And by watching and listening and combining the information, you can fill in some of the blanks. It can help you differentiate. I'm trying to read what I told myself to tell you. It can help you differentiate different sounds and different words. If you are practiced at lip reading, you have hopefully developed a little more memory for what you have seen as a person is talking. So you get down a few more words down the road and you realize that what you thought you heard or interpreted didn't make sense. And you can kind of think back not too far just a few words and sort of remember, oh, wait a minute, that wasn't the lips closing or there wasn't an S. I didn't see the teeth come together. It was something else. Okay. And that again can help you differentiate one sound that sounds like another help you differentiate those. Now, this is the important thing. As far as I'm concerned, the worst part about hearing loss is the social isolation. Anybody agree with me? Yeah. If you're by yourself and you're trying to be with a group of people and you can't follow the conversation, it's extremely isolating. It's a sad feeling. Speech reading can help you be in the loop because you are increasing the information you get out of the conversation. You're increasing the information that you get. So it's really wonderful to be able to look at a speaker if you can get your eyes and find who's talking quick enough and then get more information than just from hearing. Now, sometimes groups get to be really noisy and people are talking really fast from one side of a table to another or one side of standing in a circle, just people. It's tricky finding the speaker, but if you find that face, you are able to draw much more information from what happens. Now, I find that if I am actually looking intently just at a speaker's face, it actually feels like the sound has been of what I'm trying to listen to has been increased like somebody's turned up the volume sounds much better. When you can stay in the loop in a conversation, suddenly those feelings of isolation that are so self-defeating, those feelings of isolation are suppressed and you feel more a part of that group. So it helps you stay in the conversation. It helps you know what's going on within that group. Knowing the subject of conversation with those people is also a huge benefit to you. That's, I think for those of you who've taken my class, you can probably remember that I told you to read the paper every day because you want to know what people are talking about before they start talking about it. And then even if you have an opinion, if you are a person who wants to know the opinions of others also, you're in much better shape to get those opinions, understand those opinions, express some caring or other kinds of loving feelings about those opinions, anything that keeps communication rolling along and intensifies the amount of information that you get. I do want to say one other thing. The feelings of isolation and falling out of the loop are both subtle and obvious. If you have hearing loss, you have to be a fighter because if you allow the loneliness to get to you and you don't keep fighting to understand what people are saying, you'll get more and more out of it. So it's important to just stay in there and keep at it. It's worth it. If I had pom poms, I'd do a little cheer for you, however, not today, maybe some other day. Okay. Now, I also wrote on this page three things that lip reading or speech reading cannot do for you. And it's very important to get these expectations sort of fine tuned and adjusted. It cannot serve as a replacement for normal hearing. Number one, obviously, you cannot use speech reading as your main form of communication without listening accompanying that. I know some people who grew up in the deaf community with what they consider to be total deafness, and they claim that they can do that. It's rare. It's very rare. And if you sometimes dig back into and look at their audiograms and some other things you might find out, they are also listening. It's just they don't place the emphasis on it so much. But keep that in mind. It's very rare to find a person who can speech read and that's enough. If you have hearing aids or a cochlear implant, or any of the other whiz bang technology that people are using these days, I have to say, speech reading will work way better if you use the stuff that's fitted to you and that is designed to bring some sound into the picture. Don't go thinking you can do this without your hearing aids. It's not a stand-in for hearing aids at all. Okay. Now, the other thing I want to tell you, and this always is fun to do when I go to talk to meetings where there are a bunch of physicians and I'm doing like an in-service or something. I haven't done this in years, but I used to do this and cover my mouth and talk to them this way. And then I would take my hand away and everybody's blood pressure went back down because we really all depend on speech reading, even if your hearing is normal, even if you know everything I'm saying already, no matter what, you are dependent on these visual cues to help you out. Okay. And two other things. It takes a lot of practice, as everybody knows. You can practice in a mirror. There are some books out there now, I think, and there are very old books. If you Google speech reading, you will find a wonderful YouTube channel that allows you to practice lip reading right on YouTube. And I think it's possible there's more than one, but they unfortunately use the terms lip reading and speech reading to mean, you know, joking around with music and putting in false words and stuff like that. I don't mean that. There are real speech reading instructors on the web who can help you out and give you ways to practice, but you could just practice in a mirror, intentionally set aside practice with a human being in your life and practice with that human being. I will say this, during regular conversation, just between us and when we're talking, don't ever think about lip reading because it will distract you. You have to build up the habits of lip reading, speech reading, when you are either alone by yourself or in a period of time set aside just for practice. Your own communication with other people is so important and thinking about lip reading while you are talking or communicating with someone is just a big obstacle. So my final word to you guys is speech reading is not perfect, but it helps. End of story. Now, can I let that person in? Adi, can Adi come in? You don't have to do that. We have people behind the scenes who are monitoring that. So you just can go right ahead and do your stuff. Okay. Well, you asked me to talk for half an hour. That's been about half an hour. Would you like me to do a little bit more? Yes, Q&A. Go ahead. Who has a Q? Who has an A? We'll go with either one. I must say it's nice to see. I recognize so many of you. It's just wonderful to see all of you. So do you have any questions? I can't be that good. Anne or Ellen? Ellen, yes. Hi, Jeff. Sorry. That's okay. You know, would you talk about homophenes and what they are? Yes, absolutely. In fact, I sent the sheet when you were in my class, the first week of class, I gave you a list of homophenes. And that I think is what Anne was asking me for. So that if she would forward that to you or you can write to me and I'll forward it to you, I'll be glad to send you that sheet again. I found a reading folder. So I have it. I just thought everybody else would enjoy hearing about it. I thought so too. Okay. Well, Anne, is it possible for you to send that out to, you have the list of everybody? Okay. So let me explain what a homophene is. Not a homophone. You learned about that in sixth grade, right? Those are things that sound alike. A homophene is a sound that looks exactly like another sound. So for example, if I say dust, dust, like if it doesn't rain, we're going to be covered in dust again. Okay. You know the word I mean? Dust. You can see that that D, D, leaves a tiny little space when my teeth are slightly opened while my tongue goes up behind my teeth. You can't see my tongue. Dust. Well, I'm going to make up and, you know, the name of an elephant's tusk, tusk, the ivory tusk, the T, T and the D, D look exactly alike. Is that right? Are you good with that? Okay. So the handout that I sent over for Anne to send to you has a lot of sounds, consonant sounds, grouped together so that you can actually see which sounds look alike. It's extremely helpful. If, for example, somebody says Z and you think they're saying C, you can say to yourself, oh, wait a minute, S and Z look alike. I bet she's saying Z, not C. Okay. And what we try to do is practice those a lot. So it's just automatic because I, once again, I don't want you thinking about it too much when you're in a conversation. Jill, is that enough? Does that explain it? Yeah. Okay. Linda, go ahead. I see your hand. Yes. What exactly do you do after class? Yeah. Good question. Well, now that we're zooming, it's almost the same as it was when we were all together, but the beauty is when you're zooming, you have a front row seat. Everybody has a front row seat. And whoever you're watching, you can enlarge that picture. So you're seeing the entire screen with just the one person you're trying to learn from or listen to or understand. Okay. So now what we do is a number of different exercises. I usually, for the beginners, I usually base the first 12 classes, which is the first quarter of the academic year in the fall, on the consonants that are relatively easy to see. It doesn't mean they're easy to distinguish, but we work on those groups that are easier to see. And we do, I model them for people. I write sentences and have people try to lip read just a single word using the sentence and context. Okay. Does all this sound familiar? Have you taken lip reading before, Linda? Yes, I have. I've been involved. I'm done in Southern California with the Long Beach Lakewood chapter. I was involved with Carol from 2001 till 2007. And I've been leading the group since, but I've never really had any formal instruction in lip reading. Okay. Well, one thing that helps is understanding just a little bit about how sounds are articulated. Right. And if you've done a little bit of reading about that, that's a big help. And then, of course, the speech therapist who wrote all those articulation textbooks actually wrote them from the viewpoint of a speaker. And then you have to really think about that in terms of the viewpoint of the person seeing a speaker. And then you just, I've created many, many exercises, whatever I can dream up to give people practice. Okay. And to make it a little speedier if we can. I like to work with categories because I feel that context narrows things down so it can help you with those lookalikes. You do that too. Well, that's, you know, that's basically the kind of stuff we do. If you want to email me, I'll be glad to. I can't tell you everything I do. It'll take till tomorrow. Okay. Thank you. I'm glad to be you. Thank you, Ellen. I would love to email you. Please do. Oh, wait, wait, wait, you're muted. You're muted. You're muted. We lost you. You said, I think I'm, and then you went away. There. I'm muted now or not. I'm not muted. Okay. I just want to say thank you. And yes, I will probably email you. Okay. Thank you. What does the D in your name stand for? Deguire. Thank you. Okay. I'll look for that. Okay. Thank you. Okay. What other questions? Walt, how are you? I haven't seen you in ages. Well, oh, there are raised hands. Okay, Ellen. Um, Dave was trying to raise his hand, so he could unmute and ask this question. I'm sorry. Who was that? Dave W. Dave, go ahead. I don't see you here. I can't find you, but go ahead. Yeah. The question I had is you mentioned exercises. I wonder if you could kind of discuss or kind of give you an idea of some of the exercises you use with people in classes. Sure. One of my favorite types of exercise is something called the lightning round. Now, I will tell you that I like these so much that some of my students roll their eyes when I say we're going to do a lightning round right now, but they're really great. So I'll take two words, for example, that sounds sort of alike. They have similar acoustic features. For example, mine and nine. Mine and nine. Okay. And I'll have, you have to work with a partner for these, but what you do is you, you have the person say four words to you, and either word is mine or nine. And then you have to say it back and get it right. Right. So acoustically, they're very similar, but visually they are not homofins. They are not look-alikes. They look very different. So if I say, could you repeat that, Dave? Mine, nine, nine, nine. Yeah. I said mine, mine, nine, nine. And what happens is when you do this, you're not, your brain is really good at recognizing auditory input and remembering it, but this exercises your ability to remember the visual part too. So it's just a wonderful exercise because you're discriminating, telling those two sounds apart, remembering them and saying them back, being able to get it from the understanding part to the speaking part all inside your brain. So it's just a wonderful exercise. And you can think of any two words and do it. Okay. Sherry? No. Okay. Sherry. I really have a hard time with people talking too fast. How do you do that? How do you make them slow down? That's the hardest part. Well, we tried some things through the years, and some of them worked a little bit, I must say. One of the chapters of the Hearing Laws Association in San Francisco made up some buttons, big buttons, just like if you were campaigning for somebody, and you'd wear a button and it would say something like, slow down so I can understand you, or let me see you talk so I can lip read. Any little thing to help you remind a person, now clearly after you've worn that for a while, people don't see it anymore, right? But you can point at it, and you can also just ask people, I'm very sorry, I have a terrible hearing loss, and I'm a little under the weather today, so would you please slow down and say that again? Okay. If you want me to understand you, you have to speak slowly. Now, I've noticed that if I get nervous, I talk a little too fast, me, and I spend half my life slowing down my speech. So it's not a habit that sticks very well, because I think our speech is so related to our feelings. So you do have to remind people. It takes guts. It takes guts. You have to square your shoulders and say, wait a minute. Okay. Okay, I don't see any more blue hands. No more questions? No. Okay. And I guess I'll turn the meeting back over to you. Oh, you have a question. I actually have a comment. Yes. And it's a little bit to Sherry Jacobs, but also to everybody in general. So each one of us knows that our speak at muscle with hearing loss, it gets developed more than we may have ever dreamed of, because we need assistance from other people. And for those of you who know me in this meeting, most of you think that I never have a problem speaking up. But I have to tell you that I have that as well, too. And I have self talk inside myself when there are situations that either I'm worried about what somebody thinks about me or some whatever it is that I might get inhibited about. The pandemic for me has absolutely totally across the board completely totally changed that. My first thing out of my mouth is I cannot understand you. The next thing I say is, will you please write that down for me? Then I might go from there. Sometimes you have to repeat it three and four times. I also frequently take out my captioning app on my phone, but it depends on the distancing with the person as to how well that works. I'd like to remind people if you're going to do that, that your phones have microphones and the captioning apps work much better the closer they are to the person who's talking. So the normal way you hold your phone, if you have an iPhone is like this, I'm calling it normal. If I'm going to talk to somebody else, I rotate it and make sure to extend my hand so that the microphone is closer to that person. Ellen, are you raising your hand to make a comment about that? I am, but I should do it down. But okay, I'm raising my hand. Can you hear me? Okay. What I am aware of with microphones in general is that the noisier the environment is, the tougher it is for the microphone to know what sound you want amplified. Is that right? Do you find that noise gets in your way with your telephone with your iPhone? I don't find that background noise gets in the way of the captioning app that I use, which is called AVA. As long as the key to the effectiveness of the captioning apps is how far away the microphone is from the person. The closer the microphone is to the person, the more accurate the app is. So prior to the pandemic, I have microphones that I connect to my phone. I could hand it to somebody. But in the pandemic, you don't do that. But Ellen, to answer your question and give it a context for people, one of the things that was wonderful for me using a captioning app was using it in the car. So for years, and those of you don't know me, I got a CI in December. So some things are getting much better for me. But I couldn't understand anybody in the car for so many years. And I mounted my cell phone in event holder and connected microphones to the bottom of it, gave one to my husband, gave one to somebody in the back seat of the car. And you know, cars aren't quiet. I would definitely say a car has background noise. But my app didn't have any problem understanding people. And how does it do when you are in a noisy crowd and there's a lot of talking all around you? Have you tried? It's been so long since I've done one. I don't know. Okay. Well, if you ever notice, just drop me a line, because I am interested in how people are doing with that part of it also. We have some questions. I think people want to ask you some questions. Sherry? Sherry, your hand is up. Oh, I'm sorry. I wanted to say that using the caption app is really wonderful when you're in the doctor's office, because I can caption the doctor and know exactly what he's saying. So that's a really good use it when it's one on one like that. The caption app really works very well. Okay. I had another question, Ellen. When we were taking the class, there was a website that had a lip reading where you could practice and they had different faces with people of different ethnicities. So you had different mouth shapes and sounds. Then it was free that I remember. I lost that information. Oh my gosh. I don't even remember that right at the moment. Okay. That was a website. Let me just tell you something about people from different places or even different parts of our country. We have, I don't know if this is politically correct or not, but we all have accents. And what I think of as an accent is the way we pronounce every word, every vowel, every consonant. And we all make fun of that little sentence when we're talking about people from Boston. I popped my car in the Hobbit Yad because that leaves out the letter R to a degree. It turns it into an ah kind of a sound. Most of the time the accents are different because the vowel sounds are different. After a while, you get used to a person's accent because their vowels are always the same. They always say things the same way. It might not be how you say them. My husband's from Baltimore. I cannot pronounce the way he says water. I try, but it's some vowel that it's in between a bunch of others and my nervous system will not do it. Wooder or something like that. I should have him come in here and model it for you. Anybody from Baltimore here? No. Well, let me just say that over time it's gotten easier and easier for me to understand what he's saying. I get used to it. I expect it from him. And when there's a person with a different accent, and I'm sorry if that's not politically correct, but we desperately need to use this information, you can take note of what they say, how they say it. You can, if you want to focus on lip reading for a minute, ask them to repeat the word and watch them again. And just note the difference between what you usually expect and what that individual is doing. It's a wonderful way to help yourself. That's speech reading. Speech reading is predicting what someone's going to say, knowing how they're going to say it. All those things, it's not just watching. Use everything you've got. It's not cheating to use everything you've got. Okay. I don't know. I think that's from me today. Would you please let everybody know that if we live in, I think it's only for Californians, but if you live in California, because of the pandemic that you're teaching your class as virtually, am I correct? Yes, I'm teaching. And that anybody could take your class. And when I sent out the meeting announcement, it included that information, but I think it's nice if you explain to people how that works and what you need to do to do that. So I think on the meeting information, you had an email address for me. Did you, Ann? Okay. So what you would do is if you have questions about the speech reading class or you're thinking you'd like to register, just email me. And we can have a little conversation and I can sign you up. It's pretty easy to do. I would be sending you three different forms via email. And if you don't like to print things up, I could probably mail those forms to you. They're extremely simple to fill out. Zohair, remember how easy they were? They're extremely simple to fill out. It's mostly just your name. In one place, I think they ask your address, but you'll see very small. And then you're in the class and you do not have to live only in California. In fact, in our program, not in my classes, but in some of the art classes in our program, we have a community-based program at Foothill College. And we have students from France right now. I have a student in Portland and a student in San Diego. No, in La Jolla right now. It's just really fun to have people coming in from all over the place. Okay? So yeah, you can join my classes if you would like to. You can also join the other speech-reading instructor for Foothill who does what we call asymmetrical teaching. And that means we're not on opposite sides of the screen at any given time. She puts her classes on YouTube and you can watch her videos. And if you do that, I would like you to sign up with her. And I can send you that information also. But the advantage of having it on YouTube is you can watch something over and over again a million times or twice, whatever. And if you come to my class, it's more live. We're all in a group together. It's a little more social and that's fun too. What I like about online instruction is I can make my face big or everybody else's face big and suddenly you're just face to face with one person. It's so much better than trying to do speech-reading in a long line of students or in a big circle. And you have to look too far away to try to do any speech-reading. So it's really better online. I think we'll probably mostly keep it that way. What we're talking about is hybrid classes once this is over so that once a month we will go to the senior centers that sponsor these classes for Foothill College. We have two institutions involved and they provide us with a space and we can go once a month, I think, to all be together. And the rest of the time will continue to be online. So it's very appropriate to join the class. I probably will be online even when we're all together so that if you're in another state or something you can still participate. We'll try to keep it that way. Okay, Alan. Someone put in the chat asking if you have a website. I do not have a website. I prefer to talk to people individually. Your hearing loss is just different from anybody else's. And there are plenty of informational websites out there. I don't have a website, but I am very happy to go back and forth with email with you. Okay. Caroline? Yeah, so talking about accent, I do have an accent. I am French. So I am interested in your classes. I am in a San Francisco Bay Area. But my question is, when you say you have group classes, Zoom, what time zone are you? Are you on the East Coast? No, I teach for Foothill College, which is in Los Altos, and we're Pacific Town. So the beginning classes are Mondays or Tuesday. You can either come to Monday or Tuesday at one. The Monday classes are a little bit weird because they're scheduled to compensate for the Monday holidays that the college has. Many years ago, I said, I don't want these classes to be for credit and I don't want people to have to pay. And they said, well, okay, but then you have a few other restrictions. And one of them is the Monday classes are about 10 or 15 minutes longer than the Tuesday classes. And then you have some days that you don't have class. Yeah, Linda, she knows about that. Yeah. So just to clarify, so is it once a week like you pick either the Monday or the Tuesday? Yes. Okay. Yes, once a week. Where are you in the Bay Area, Caroline? I'm in Walnut Creek about 45 minutes east of San Francisco. I have to figure out what I work full time. So I'll have to see how I can fit in. How long are the classes? The Monday classes are generally speaking, well, it depends on the quarter, but they're somewhere between one hour and 55 minutes and two hours and 10 minutes. But winter quarter, we have a couple of holidays. So they try to compensate for that by making those classes longer. Okay. Tuesday, the classes are always one hour and 55 minutes long. Okay. Okay. Thank you. And because I made them non credit, I have plenty of students who say I can only stay for half the class and that's fine. It's all about practicing anyway. So if you have to be somewhere else, it doesn't really matter. We treat everybody like a grown up in there. Okay. Okay. Anne. Yeah. So Caroline, when I mean, at one time, I think that there were almost 10 of us from our chapter who were taking Ellen's classes when they were at Decara. And we would go to the class once a week. And then as a class, as a chapter program, we met once a week to practice. So if there were a number of people who wanted to do that again, we might be able to arrange through our chapter to be able to set up a Zoom meeting for all of you to be able to practice. Now, I'd have to say we'd have to use the auto captions rather than wonderful quarry because of the fee. But that I'm thinking that that should be an easily doable thing. So if people were interested in that, I wanted to mention that we could probably set up a practice session for you if there were enough of you. I must say Corey is doing a wonderful job captioning. Now is your hand still? Oh no, you took it away. Okay. All right. We're here sitting ducks throw something else at us. We can figure it out. No, no more questions. Have you all you all look the same? Those of you who were in my classes before, I'm so glad to see you again. How is it that you're not aging? I feel like I've aged 100 years through this pandemic. Unmute yourself, Walt. I think Walt is talking. I'm not sure. Walt. Okay. Can you hear me now? Yeah. Yes. Okay. I planning to get a cochlear implant later this year. My hearing has gotten a lot worse since we last met at your your speech reading class. And it's really bad. So I need something. The only comment I make is with everyone masking, it's very difficult for a little lip reading. I sometimes I get so frustrated. I tell the person stand at 10 feet away from me, but take your mask off so I can read your lips. That's right. That's a good idea. That's a very good idea. Let me add there are have you have you heard about the transparent masks? They're kind of as far as I know, they're usually rather expensive, but they have like a clear window and they are not great because the window as I understand it fogs up. So I haven't talked to enough people who have used those successfully yet. I've talked to some people who've had problems with them, but I would not give up on those. Do you know about you know about those? I would talk about a clear mask over the face. You're talking about a mask with a little window in it. And the mask covers it. The round window is about this big. It goes around. You haven't seen them. Well, I haven't seen them and probably is. Let me find out if I can get a brand name. You can also Google clear masks or window masks and you might be able to find it that way. There you go. This one and is showing you one called the communicator, but that has just a very small window. If you look at Anne's picture, but I will tell you that there are some that have a larger window and have you used those communicators? Unfortunately, it has to be on the person you're looking at and they don't usually have those. You have to carry them and give them to the person you're talking to, which is very unusual. It gets a little expensive because you're handing them to your dentist and your doctor and whoever you go to visit. Now I know that down here in Santa Clara, it has become popular for doctors to keep those in their office and use them when they have patients who ask for them. So baby writer is holding up another transparent face mask. Oh, okay. Let me change to window view here. I can see all of you. There we go. No, that didn't work. I'm sorry. It's backwards. Can you all read backwards? That's a much better one, Katie. What is that one called? It's called clear mask. I wonder if you could say that again. Clear mask. Thank you. Clear mask. It's easier to understand when we can see your face. That's right. You have to take it out of the package. Okay. So clear mask looks like a better bet. Have you used it yet, Katie? I've used it occasionally. And does it fog up like this? Yeah, clear mask. And does that fog up? Yeah, it is fogging up right now. So as you can see, this technologically is a very difficult problem. We're complaining about ventilation in school classrooms. While they're working on that, I'd like them to ventilate these masks somehow because that has to be done too. But clear masks are one option. If you have a cochlear implant, hopefully it will bring you more information. I'm talking to Walt right now, but I don't see his face. I guess he went away. Oh, there you are, Walt. And I think you will find hopefully that lip reading can help you more because you'll be hearing a little more. Yeah. From what I understand from people in the group that do have cochlear implants, you got to have a lot of practice. Yes. Learning what the sounds are. Yeah. It does take practice. And you know, so many of my students are, shall we say, over 45. And sometimes double that. And the remembering part is tricky. But the one thing we've all learned over the past few years is that learning is something that if you keep doing it, it keeps your brain going. So I sort of feel good about the fact that I'm challenging my students and you're trying to remember and you're exercising and you're doing it again and again. Okay. Wait for me. No. It's not too late. And I'm just on a personal note, Walt. I'm delighted that you're getting an implant. Absolutely delighted. You, I hope will love it. Yeah. Hi. Allen. I think Caroline had another question. Caroline, where are you? I don't see you here. Oh, there you are, Caroline. Go ahead. It wasn't a question. It was about the clear mask. I work for a little reading program. And so we will be returning. So we teach reading to children one on one. And one of the aspects is we have them sound out. So we felt like the children need to be able to see our teacher's mouth. So I just found some disposable masks. So they're not as big opening as the one the other lady showed, but they're single use. So they're more like similar to the, you know, those blue or white kind of fabric surgical mask, but they have just a clear opening just in the mouse area. And I've tried them for the past couple of days and talking to some of my colleagues, and they never fogged up. So except the, and then the FDA, I was looking at something that is FDA approved. It's made in USA. And so they're just not as big as the one at the clear mask. And except I think the clear mask might be reusable. Yeah. Those ones, they're just like single use. I think this communicator that that is holding up right now, if you look for Anne's picture, is that the one you're talking about? Yeah. Yes. Exactly. It's more like those fabric mask. And you just see the mouse part except they're the one I got the single use. So you have to, you know, dispose them. And I think that was fun. I just wanted to try it was a box of 40. So I think it makes it to like 60, 66 cents a mask or something like that. And then now I'm thinking I just got them, but you got me thinking when you say, Oh, when we go to places, yes, it's true. Yesterday, I had a gathering with friends outside. And of course, we were masked. And then when it started to get dark, it was very difficult for me to hear my friend. So when you say, well, we need to be bold. I'm just thinking, well, next time I'm going to go to an event, not like a large event, anyway, I don't do large event, but I want to bring this mask. And I'm going to ask my friend to use them. And then I will be able to see their mouse. And I'm providing them a safe and brand new mouse that costs only 66 cents. So that's what I'm planning on doing. Carolyn, I think that's that's just making me smile. It's wonderful. And I want you to think about, I'll be with you in a minute. And I see your hand. I want you to think about I was talking before about giving people a button that says slow down or wearing a button yourself that says slow down so I can lip read or something like that. If you have to wear a mask for your friend and with a window in it, and your friend has given that to you, it might serve as a reminder to speak slowly and clearly, right? So I, I, I think I can see lots of advantages to your idea. How did you find it? Oh, can I ask you a question? Give me a second How did you find that online, Carolyn? Did you just Google clear masks? Yeah. There's many, many options out there from, you know, different prices. It can go up to 25 dollars a single mask because some of them come with some fancy fabric, but working for a little school, I was concerned, you know, I wanted the anti-foxing so people don't have to touch it all the time. And I was, I wanted some things that was safe, like people say be careful of the stitches. You want to make sure it's good quality. So the stitches, you know, like no droplets can go through the plastic and the fabric stitching. So as a school, I just found those that were FDA approved made in USA. And I put a little thing in the chat. It's called safe. And then the capital letter N, clear, safe and clear. And it just, it comes in a minimum of one box is 40 pieces. But as I say, you will find tons of options. And Mia was selecting something that is anti-fog and something that I felt was safe in terms of stitches. Thank you. I'm writing it down. I guess Alan put the link. Safe and clear. That came out in your chat. So if you want to open the chat window, I think you'll see it there. And I'd like to thank you, Caroline, for all that information. That was wonderful. Anne, did you have something you wanted to say? Thank you for waiting. Yeah, no problem. So Caroline, the name of the company is safe and clear. And it was approved long before the pandemic. So a woman who was a nurse had experienced the difficulty for people in a healthcare setting. And so it was pre approved by the FDA, maybe four or five years ago. And I had them for a long time because I was promoting their use to dentists. So you go to the dentist and they all wear face masks. I could never understand what they say. So the name of this mask, though, is called the communicator. So that's the name of the mask. And the company is safe and clear. Now, I've been using them for a long time. And the key to keeping them to not fog up is you need to make sure that that nose piece is tight. There's a piece in there. But a drawback of these is the side buckles out. So it's not really tight to your face. And since we're talking about face masks, all of you know, I have been very concerned about being able to understand people while at vaccination sites. And I have approached all kinds of people in our state about that. And nobody answered me. But when I went to get my vaccination this past week, I very clearly said, I can't understand anything you're saying. So the first person that I walked up to who was, you know, kind of guiding people, oh, stand in line still, he immediately got out his phone. And he was talking into his phone. So captioning that, oh, actually, I think he was texting in his phone with his thumbs. So I could under he understood me. Then the send you to the next line. And that person, I said, I can't understand you. So then they wanted to get closer to me, you know, that same thing. So, you know, can I say, well, he went and got somebody else. And I think it was a manager. And I got complete special treatment. She stood back like seven feet and said, took off her mask and said, Can you understand me now? And I said yes. Well, then she hand walked me through the whole process. So I'm encouraging everybody to really, really speak up. The nurse who gave me the inoculation changed her mask and put on a different face mask. It was a clear one, this big, the whole thing was clear. It was the best one that I had ever had the opportunity to use with someone. So there was no piece of stuff that really interfered with seeing the whole face. So I just wanted to mention that to everybody since we're talking about face masks. Okay. May I ask you a question about that? When you said I cannot understand you, how is it that they instantly knew that that was because of your hearing loss? Oh, no, I told you, I can't understand you. I can't understand. I didn't say hearing loss. I said I can't understand anybody who has wearing a face mask. Okay. And it's so important to give very clear explanations of why you are having trouble understanding. There are many reasons for not understanding. And it's important that the kind of modifications that you require are the kind you would think of, if you know you're talking to someone with a hearing loss. So if you just say, I can't understand you, they might switch to French thinking you might be Carolyn or they might you know, think that you're someone who doesn't have receptive language skills. That happens to people. It's a horrible thing, but it does happen. So there are many reasons for not understanding. And I'm sure Anne did this and I'm sure they got a very clear picture of what the problem is. But I just would like to point out that if you just say, huh, you're not going to get the help you need. So yeah. Okay. So it's very important to, to ask people for specifically what you want them to do, at least get them started so they get a clue. I'm sure Jill remembers me saying this in class about a hundred times. Okay. Any more blue hands? Questions? Well, I guess everybody is questioned out and I'd like to thank you very much for joining us today. All of us who have taken your class are very happy to see you. And we hope that those of you who came today who haven't taken Ellen's class found valuable information in how you can help improve your life through lip reading and speech reading from the information that Ellen has shared with us. I highly encourage taking her class. I think that almost 10 of us here would go yes, yes, yes. And not only was taking her class wonderful, but also the camaraderie that those of us who took the class developed with each other was off the chart. Well, the deep dark secret, thank you, that was the nicest thing you could have said. The deep dark secret is I started doing this because what I'm really trained as an audiologist, the concern that I have about hearing loss is the isolation it creates. So my classes are designed to keep you in touch with other people and you do find new friends. You do practice online. You do get together and practice in other times. And I think it's just that's the best part as far as I'm concerned. The best part. Nobody, well, haven't done any marriages yet. Nobody's gotten married that I know of. Oh, I mean, not like a couple who, what's he, 90s, one of them's 90 something in the assisted living home and she's 88. And they communicate with a captioning app. No surprise there. No surprise. I am noticing that the effect on our community of having taught so many people about hearing loss. Oops, did you go away? Okay. Having taught so many people about hearing loss is that I find now that there are nurses aides and nursing assistants who help in residential facilities who have heard all these lists of instructions that I just gave to you and they tell one another and it just spreads and the news is getting around. So I think it's making the world a little bit better. Little bit better. The more you teach people about how to communicate, the more you're doing for everybody, not just you. We'd like to remind everybody who's with us today that we are a member organization. And even though our meetings are open to the public, we'd like to encourage you to join us, be part of our community in the Southern Solano, Contra Costa, and Eastern Alameda County. And it's very easy to do. All you need to do is go to our website. The address is on the slide here. And if you see the green circle around where it says membership, then just click on that and you can join right online. That's a good question. Yeah. Is there any reason you need to limit your membership to people who live nearby now? If you're going to have your meetings online? Oh, no. We have members who live in San Francisco. We have members who live in other parts of Alameda County. When I talk about this, I mentioned the area that's our focus area because I don't want the other chapters to feel like we may be trying to infringe on potential membership for them. Gotcha. So of course, I welcome everybody. Historically in our chapter, Bob Zastrow for probably 20 years at the end of our meeting makes homemade muffins and distributes homemade health food, high grain muffins that all of us have come to love and enjoy. So since we can't make it in person, we have a muffin from Bob for all of you. Bob, can you say something so people can see your face? I don't know if my face is so wet. I don't have any faces on the screen at all right now. Bob, if you don't have any faces on your screen, if you look, press the escape button. And if you look on the upper right hand corner, you'll see something that says view. And you have a choice of having it be speaker view, gallery view. So you're probably not in the right setting. And I'm happy to go through that with you after our meeting is over one day next week. Does that work for you? I'm not sure if you can hear me. I really, I've got it on the screen right now. It's a Zoom launch meeting. And I lost pictures. I just turned off screen. I just got the thumbnails back. I just got the thumbnails back just now. And I had the thumbnails for a while. But sometimes about the middle of the presentation, I lost everything except my email page turned up. When I tried to close the email page. It's a setting in the upper right hand corner. I got a screen picture. And then when I tried to go back to Zoom, I went back through the procedure of launch meeting, clicking on join meeting in progress. And I got a button that says launch meeting, which I still have. I clicked on that. Okay. And your pictures are sort of, I don't know if you did this. I didn't touch anything. So Bob, are you saying that you lost the connection to the Zoom meeting? I lost the connection to the Zoom meeting. And it was just, I didn't touch anything. It just happened. And I also had a sound problem several times during the presentation. The sound disappeared. And this has happened the last couple of Zoom meetings. The sound would do nothing. And I'm not sure what caused this. So if we connect one day next week, I'll walk through the whole thing with you. Just to make sure that you know what all of the icons and things mean. And Alan, you have your hand up to address something you want to talk to Bob? Think what he did. Somehow he activated his email. And so it covered up his Zoom screen. And he didn't know how to get back to it. So he may want to close all other programs when he's using Zoom. So this doesn't happen. No, just, this is the first time that I've lost the picture completely. I never had that problem before. But the last couple of meetings, I've had the sound would disappear. And then for some reason, I'd click on the mute button. And a couple of times the sound appeared. And sometimes it would disappear for a short period of time. And then reappear, I wouldn't do anything. And just. So see, on this side, we can tell if you disconnected from the meeting. And Alan Katsura monitors those behind-the-scenes things. So he knows that you didn't disconnect from the meeting. So I'll work on you about that next week. Okay. Next Wednesday, I'll go in for my second shot. I'll email you about that. Okay. Okay. So that's Bob. And this is his muffin. And they're really delicious. And I'd like to make sure that everybody knows how to connect to us. We have a wonderful website that Alan Katsura created for us. You are email address is infoathearinglostdv.org. And we are forever and always grateful at the Choridosti for providing the fabulous over-the-chart captions for us. And unless anybody else has something special or new to share, we're going to say goodbye for today. So one last chance. Is there anybody who has something else to add? I just want to say it was good to see Alan again after all these years. If you were closer, I'd go to another class. That's it. Yeah. It was wonderful seeing Alan again. It just reminded me of what we did a few years ago. Well, if you really want to, you are very, very welcome to join one of the lip-reading classes that we do online. And I would love to have you because I'll let me just say it's wonderful to see you folks too. And I felt so bad that I had to stop coming up to Jakarta. So I'm looking forward to seeing all of you in my class. How's that? Make you feel guilty. Okay. Okay. So we look forward to seeing you at our next meeting, which is going to be, I think it's the same day in April, April 6th. We're the first Saturday of the month. I also want to make sure that everybody knows there are upcoming HLAA virtual meetings, webinars. Alan Kasura and I have been asked by HLAA to give some tech workshops for leaders. So if anybody wants to learn how to use Zoom better, how to use the internet and your email, we'd like to bring everybody up to speed so that people are really comfortable with the technology that exists at the time. And so there'll be more information coming out about that. So, bye everybody.