I have a severe hearing loss (auditory neuropathy). The gist of it is that I struggle to fit sounds to words. I can hear that someone is talking, but I don't understand what they said. It's kind of like speaking to people who mumble a lot or speak in a different dialect.
As a result, verbal communication is often very difficult. Meetings are very difficult and I tend to not understand most of what was said. My hearing is worse with groups, where I not only have to shift my attention from speaker to speaker, but I also cannot easily ask for repetition.
Even worse, phones are almost unusable. For some speakers, I can't understand a thing they say on the phone.
As a result, I thrive in text-based communication. Email is my primary method of communication. Conversations that are done via written text are fluid and intelligent, while in-person conversations tend to become a mess where I have to ask for repetition multiple times. Quite frankly, I feel that I look stupid when this happens (and when I worked in retail, several customers were brash enough to point that out).
I don't want to create a burden for management or my co-workers, but I can work so much better if communication is provided in a form that I can work with (namely written text). But I understand that verbal communication is much faster and fluid for most people.
Thus, my question is how I can improve this communication, without burdening others. It seems reasonable to expect that people email me instead of calling me. Meetings are harder, though. There's no minutes being kept or anything, and it seems like too much to expect people to use a different format of meeting.
For what it's worth, most of my job can be done without much human contact. I'm a software engineer and come May, I really just have to meet up for in-person meetings three days a week with everything else being done remotely.
Thus, my question is how I can improve this communication, without burdening others? What can a person with a severe hearing loss do to improve communication?
