HLAA – Montgomery County Chapter

Travel conditions for tomorrow (Tuesday, December 2, 2025) evening are looking difficult, and for many of us, driving at night in bad weather is ill advised. Therefore we have decided to cancel our Holiday Party this year, and do not plan to reschedule.

The HLAA MontCo chapter does not meet in January or February, so we’ll be looking forward to seeing everybody on March 3, 2026.

We hope that you can celebrate the Holidays in whatever means you find appropriate: Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, or whatever Tradition you follow, and all the Best for the New Year.

Diana Bender reviewed the varieties of ways that people with hearing loss deal with background noise. Some are operational: avoid noisy situations, or move conversations to a quieter location. Some situations can be made less noisy by a simply request, but some level of assertive behavior can sometimes solve a problem.

Many hearing aids now provide some measure of noise reduction. Microphone configuration can provide directivity, which can help to suppress noise. There are a variety of focus modes on hearing aids that can suppress noise other than speech.

A remote microphone is a major step in dealing with noise. The microphone picks up the sound at its source and transmits it directly to the ear.

Members added questions and answers to these topics.

Do you have trouble hearing when background noise is loud? The October meeting will explain how noise reduction programs in hearing aids and cochlear implants work to improve our hearing in noise. We will also briefly review the new hearing aids which use AI to get further improvement.

We meet at the Jeanes Library, 4051 Joshua Road, Lafayette Hill, PA 19444, at 5:30 on Tuesday, November 4, 2025. Watch this space for details.

Please join us.

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Chapter member Alice Dungan described how to deal with all the people you need to deal with, from initial contact, to signing in, handling the range of treatment you might be provided with, and the whole range of transactions you might be subject to.

Many attendees were able to share experiences in dealing with a wide range of dealing with health care.

We will not do a picnic at a local park this year, after limited growth of such an event over the last few years. Our chapter will not meet in July and August, but will meet again in the first Tuesday in September. Watch this space.

Captioning technology has grown explosively, to the great benefit of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community. It can be dizzying to try to sort out the available devices and processes. This will be the topic of our March meeting.

What is ‘Live Captions’? How does ‘Google Live Transcribe’ differ from ‘Apple Live Transcribe’? What is ‘Microsoft Translator’? How about ‘Clips’?

It will be based on a presentation by Tina Childress, a name familiar to many of us. She spoke to the NYC chapter of HLAA recently, and the chapter makes the video available. There will be time for questions.

The video presentation covered a wide range of captioning aspects, and led to a discussion of experiences with the technology.

The YouTube video is available at:  https://youtu.be/Pbi8xivBzw8

Next month April 1, Jim Saunders will speak about hearing loss from a historical perspective.

Organized by Kathy Harral and enjoyed by 15 MontCo members and friends.

MontCo does not meet in January and February.   Watch this space for details of our March 2025 meeting.

 At our November 5 meeting, Arleen Barisa spoke about her visit to the HLAA National Convention in Phoenix in June.  She attended numerous workshops and lectures, and brought back many pieces of useful information.

This provoked a lengthy discussion of technical developments in hearing assistance.

The function of the new listserv  https://groups.io/g/hlaamcc/ was discussed.

Our holiday party will be on Tuesday, December 3, at 5:30pm, and will be a dessert and snack event.   Kathy Harral will coordinate contrutions.