I’m currently in an Orientation & Mobility (O&M) graduate program. It’s a field where I teach people with visual impairments how to travel safely, efficiently and independently. As someone who was born with mild sensorineural hearing loss, it has been fascinating learning about how blind people utilize their sense of hearing. They localize and track traffic sounds to align themselves at an intersection for street crossings. The traffic surge is vital for identifying a safe time to begin a street crossing when they can’t see the traffic/pedestrian lights. Because of this, professionals in my field are often the first identify a potential hearing loss in our clients and students.
With people living longer today, the aging population unfortunately has a double whammy both hearing and vision loss. When programming hearing aids, are audiologists also accounting for this population and the need to hear low frequencies for orientation and travel? Most hearing aids like mine are programmed to improve speech clarity since people typically have high-frequency hearing loss. As a hearing aid user going through the blindfold training in my O&M program, I had continuous difficulty with the mentioned auditory skills in the previous paragraph. Apparently, the traffic sounds that provide vital information for travel and orientation are in the low frequency range. I brought it up to my audiologist at my next appointment. She pressed some buttons in the hearing aid software, then bam, I could suddenly localize traffic sounds and walk straight under blindfold.
I’m not really sure how to word what I am asking, but I am very interested in this topic and would love to learn more in this area from the expertise of audiologists. I’m somewhat familiar with high-frequency sensorineural hearing loss, but I’ve had difficulty wrapping my head around cochlear implants and hearing aids with conductive hearing loss.
Out of curiousity, are there any topics that you audiologists would like to learn more about to understand your client population with visual impairments better and how you can support them? And vice versa, what is something not obvious, but important for Orientation & Mobility specialists like me to know for working with clients with hearing loss? I know as I gain more experience in my career as an O&M, there will be times I will have to help my clients advocate for hearing services.
Thank you in advance for taking them time to read through this lengthy post!