I spend a lot of time and energy thinking about the situation I'm going to be in and what strategies and hearing assistive technology would be appropriate. Let's say I'm going out to dinner with friends. I have a variety of technologies I might consider bringing.

I own two cell phones. The primary phone I use for making calls, with apps for controlling my hearing devices and other hearing accessibility features, and another phone for the speech-to-text app I prefer to use. The apps need different operating systems, which is why I have two phones. I also have a remote microphone that works well but has some usability issues that trip me up but it's much more effective than the remote microphone built into my primary phone in certain situations.

Each of these devices has different ways of charging them so if I'm bringing a battery backup in case a device runs out of power I need all the additional cables and accessories. I also need enough time to charge everything up before heading out of the house to an event. All this takes time, planning, and organization so I have some confidence in my ability to fully participate. As I said, going out isn't as easy as it used to be.

I’m a product designer at a technology firm, who has hearing loss. My team has a lot of virtual meetings, and I rely on captions for those meetings. Even with captions, I can miss pieces of the conversation trying to synthesize what I'm hearing with what I'm seeing via lipreading and what I'm reading in the captions. When there's a mismatch between what I got from listening and lipreading and what the captions said, I'm not always sure which is right. Luckily, my team was up for a little experiment.

We tried running a meeting with our speakers turned off, relying only on captions. From that experience, everyone realized that it was easy for team members with hearing loss to lose the thread of the conversation when something went wrong with the captions.  Now we all turn our captions on. It gives all of us a chance to monitor them and share the responsibility for communicating well.

My local performing arts center makes using their assistive listening systems easy. Here's how they make it work.

• There's a kiosk in the main entry with signage indicating the use of assistive listening systems in all theaters.
• The staff are well trained in the FM system they use.
• Your ticket shows which hall you are going to, and the staff person sets the receiver to the proper channel, explains how it works, and assures you the batteries are fully charged because they are changed each night.
• The staff person asks if you want to use a headset or a neckloop and also can explain how each works.
• There is a way for you to test the sound at the kiosk using music that is piped in from the hall where your event is being held to ensure the equipment is working before you even leave the kiosk.
• You do not have to leave any ID to receive the equipment; the ticket you purchased in advance serves as the ID.
• You make your way to your seat, relax and enjoy the show alongside everyone else