Helpful Tools for Hard of Hearing Vloggers
In the US, almost 4% of the total population is deaf or hard of hearing, representing around 11 million individuals across all age groups.
Furthermore, 48 million Americans report some degree of hearing impairment. As vibrant members of society, it’s only natural that many individuals want to try vlogging. After all, vlogging is a rapidly evolving industry, which Statista estimates has seen global reach expand by over 23% in early 2024 alone.
That said, vlogging is a primarily casual form of content that leans heavily into imagery and audio. As such, those with hearing loss may face some struggles when creating universally engaging videos that both hearing and deaf audiences will appreciate. Thankfully, there are new tools regularly being rolled out that help hard of hearing individuals through various tasks–which can include vlog production. Read on to find out more:
Advanced hearing aids
A common concern among hearing aid users is a lack of sound directionality. For many traditional hearing aids, sounds are generally amplified, so it’s hard to determine distance or direction. This can be a frustrating hurdle for a vlogger, as it can make it hard to shoot in busy areas or even collaborate with other content creators. An effective way around this is to use advanced hearing solutions that can isolate sounds better.
Closed captioning services
Closed captions are a must if you want to cater to all audiences. They will help those with hearing concerns and those with autism, attention deficits, and learning difficulties. Presently, most mainstream video-sharing platforms like YouTube and Twitch do offer auto-closed captioning. However, these are not always accurate. Unfortunately, this means taking on the burden of captioning themselves personally for many creators.
Aside from being time-consuming, though, vloggers who are hard of hearing may have a hard time captioning videos with less-than-stellar audio. Luckily, there are now crowdsourcing closed captioning services. For instance, the Amara platform lets account holders invite viewers to contribute their own translations and closed captions. In some cases, creators may even work alongside their viewer volunteers by helping edit already submitted captions. If done correctly, this will help create videos that are accessible to you and your viewers, engage your existing audience, and reduce your personal workload.
AI interpreters and translations
For some hard of hearing individuals, signing is just more convenient to do. Alternatively, some may find that they revert to this language when tired or with certain people. If you’re also working with other hard of hearing people, you may find that they’re more comfortable signing rather than using their voice. In these cases, AI interpreters and translators are needed. This is the exact mission that Sign Speak is dedicated to. As a real-time translation software, it uses machine learning to identify sign language and interpret it into speech for non-sign language speakers. Currently, it’s been used in business and virtual chat settings, but it can also be adapted for vlogging purposes. Having this kind of software can reduce the time that you would have to spend manually interpreting the sign language while editing.