I meet with both customers and co-workers from home and spend a lot of time online in virtual meetings on videoconferencing software. It’s amazing to be able to look right at the person who’s talking and be able to both hear and lip-read them. The difference is like night and day. It's so much easier for me to understand people, compared to being in the same room, halfway down a meeting table from the speaker, with a loud HVAC system humming in the background.
One thing that caught me by surprise is what happens when a person is talking with a brightly-lit window behind them. Wow. Their features disappear entirely; lip-reading becomes impossible! I’ve had to ask people to swivel their laptops around so the window is not right behind them. It feels a little awkward, but the difference to me, in terms of hearing, is huge.
