12 ms·

I’m deaf, and this is what happens when I get on a Zoom call

376 points by qkeast 6y ago

sand500 6y ago
We have tried both Meet and Zoom for the ASL class I am taking. Both are fine until the instructor needs to present a powerpoint. Zoom stops showing everyone's video. Not sure if there is a difference between Zoom desktop app and Zoom chrome extension. For Meet, it is nice that the instructor can present from a tablet but there is no way to hid the presentation video so it is way too small to see everyone signing.
- cstejerean 6y ago
  If you have two screens for Zoom you can keep one screen for screen share and see everyone else on the other. I think there might be a way to turn on this dual window approach on a single screen too so you can control how much screen real estate each gets.
  - saurik 6y ago
    Yeah: you can activate a floating gallery panel of video feeds.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    Only with the native app. The same one that intentionally bypassed Mac security.
- Groxx 6y ago
  It's a feature of Zoom, meetings can be set up to force presenter control. I'm not sure if there's a way to allow individuals to bypass it, but it is something the meeting-creator can turn off.
- Schweigi 6y ago
  With the Zoom desktop app you can click a button on the top right to switch the view. This allows you to see the presentation and the gallery view at the same time (make sure to have a recent app version). With the mouse you can resize the view between presentation and videos if you like to make the videos bigger.
- zdragnar 6y ago
  I am not a huge fan of a lot of Microsoft products, but I have been very pleasantly surprised by the Teams desktop app for video calls. With a decent sized screen, it seems to work pretty well at keeping everyone "present" on the screen, though I haven't experienced using it with people who only speak visually.
- benjiweber 6y ago
  Zoom also has an option to show the video in a second window to the shared screen if you enable multi screen mode. (You don't need two screens)
- r00fus 6y ago
  Zoom can show face video if you don't maximize the screen - the participants show up on top. Or use a 2nd monitor. Zoom was the first one to capitalize on 3 monitors - I've used a bidirectional share + participants on the 3rd screen.
  - mercurywells 6y ago
    Yeah I just exit full-screen mode. Then I can see the screen + anyone with video on and chat.
  - sand500 6y ago
    I don't think it shows everyone at once though? Which is pretty important in an ASL class. I only have the chrome extension which doesn't support popping videos out to separate monitors.
phendrenad2 6y ago
I've noticed that since everyone has gone remote, everyone wants to Zoom more. Things that could be a short discussion in Slack or a quick comment on a github PR are now a full-fledged Zoom meeting. I end up taking notes, which makes the meeting even more slow and awkward. If I were deaf, it would be impossible to do my job.
- senkora 6y ago
  I’m sure this differs across people and companies, but in my experience a one-on-one Zoom meeting is often faster than the slack discussion would be. It’s similar to walking over to your coworkers desk to chat for things that are too longwinded for slack but not worth a meeting.
  - Gracana 6y ago
    However, it may be less convenient for them when you do that.
    - r00fus 6y ago
      So don't become Lumbergh from Office Space, and read the room/audience. Use at your own discretion. Same goes for using the /zoom in slack - if a back & forth is ensuing it may require a faster latency than slack can provide so a call which can upgrade to video/screenshare is nice.
      - Gracana 6y ago
        Oh, I'm the last one to start a call like that, because I know how bad it is to get stopped in your tracks and diverted when you're on a roll. Not that calls and conversations can't be useful, I just... don't like it when people think that's the only way to communicate.
  - machello13 6y ago
    It's faster, but it's also (from my experience) a bit more taxing and often a bit draining. Unless it needs to be resolved quickly or it's a particularly complex issue, I much prefer the relaxed back-and-forth of a slack chat.
shalmanese 6y ago
I wonder if there's a way to build a video codec that does automatic lip detection and sends the lip data in much higher resolution than the rest of the stream?
- qppo 6y ago
  Video codecs already do this, to a degree. One of the key uses of wavelet transforms.
- Retr0spectrum 6y ago
  This is effectively what Nvidia Maxine claims to do.
retrac 6y ago
I'm on the flip-side of this. I have enough hearing that it is only sometimes a barrier. But I have an associated speech impediment. Voice recognition is always garbled.
GEBBL 6y ago
I am deaf too and I echo the sentiments of the article. I’ve found Microsoft teams vital for me as it has auto captions enabled. Zoom doesn’t have this, so we have shifted away from using zoom completely. Back in pre covid times, customer calls were done in a room over a conference speaker phone. I would be totally lost and would need to rely on my colleagues to help. With Microsoft teams, I can run customer calls myself, relying on the captions (and the patience of the customer). Massive thanks to Microsoft for spearheading accessibility. I hope you guys see this.
- cddotdotslash 6y ago
  One thing that might help you is the Google Recorder app. It has live speech to text and you can prop your phone next to your laptop running Zoom. It's not ideal but can help make the meeting a bit easier to follow.
  - adinisom 6y ago
    Can confirm... a phone running Google's Live Transcribe propped up next to my laptop is even better for me than Google Meets captions because you can see the history. Will have to try Google Recorder.
- pkaye 6y ago
  I use hearing aids and there is still a bug in Microsoft Teams when you connect via Bluetooth. The ring tone is super loud despite adjusting volume. Other people have complained months back and it still is not resolved. Fortunately my hearing is good enough that I can put headphones on top of my hearing aids to avoid this problem.
  - mleonhard 6y ago
    I have this problem with Bose SoundSport headphones and FaceTime Audio. The ring and answer tones are often painfully loud. Over three years and several firmware updates, it's still not fixed. I think Bose has become unable to focus on user experience. This is shown by: 1) their decision to remove physical buttons, 2) ignoring counterfeit products sold on Amazon, and 3) failing to make their $350 bluetooth headphones pause music when you take them off.
gbh444g 6y ago
Hi Quinn! Coincidentally, I've been working on a sound visualizer which accurately translates sound to visuals, while preserving all the information and, what's way more important, it transfers the "sound symmetry" which we often refer to as "musical harmony". The visuals can be translated back to sound. As someone with nearly perfect hearing and musical education background, I find the visuals oddly accurate when I also listen to the corresponding music. It can trivially distinguish human vowels, as those produce different recognizable shapes. I've put together a few sample images and a live demo: check out "github soundshader" (the project that talks about ACFs). I'm really curious what you think about this.
- codetrotter 6y ago
  Clickable link https://github.com/soundshader/soundshader.github.io https://github.com/soundshader/soundshader.github.io
- yorwba 6y ago
  Is there a reason you don't just link directly to https://soundshader.github.io/ https://soundshader.github.io/ or https://github.com/soundshader/soundshader.github.io https://github.com/soundshader/soundshader.github.io ?
  - gbh444g 6y ago
    I tried doing just that not so long ago: HN promptly shadowbanned my account and my IP address.
    - yorwba 6y ago
      If you send an email to hn@ycombinator.com the mods fix false positives like that pretty quickly.
      - whatatita 6y ago
        Is this documented somewhere?
centimeter 6y ago
"we need to make work more inclusive for people living with disabilites" - statements like this are pretty popular, and they sound nice to the first order. However, I have never once seen a statement like this accompanied by a utilitarian/economic analysis of whether this would actually be socially beneficial given the (usually) small number of people involved compared to the (often) large cost of making the change. And whenever someone says "would this really be worth it", responses vary from "Wow, why do you hate the disabled?" to "You should be glad you're not disabled" - in any case, shaming the person asking this question rather than addressing the (reasonable) question. About 2 in 1000 people in the US are deaf, and most of those are deaf due to old age, so they are not working anymore. I think it's very unlikely that the marginal optimum is to spend more money optimizing for this subset of users.
- jonpurdy 6y ago
  I would assume that there usually isn't an immediate economic benefit of doing so. Fortunately, we live in a society that is much more inclusive than it used to be. As Tim Cook said, "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI". Aside from the monetary benefits (or lack thereof), if one product focuses on accessibility and another doesn't, the small subset of users who need those features may encourage or force a larger number of users to use the more accessible product. So long-term, I think there is a benefit, even aside from helping make society more inclusive.
  - centimeter 6y ago
    This sort of commentary betrays a stiflingly first-order thought process. Sure, being "more inclusive" is a benefit - this is included in any utilitarian or economic analysis of the change. However, instead of spending X marginal dollars being more inclusive to deaf people, you could also spend that money on any number of other outcomes (pick your pleasant-sounding cause: cancer research, homeless outreach, just making everyday people's lives a bit better). If you don't understand how "monetary benefits" tie in to scalable social optimization, you should probably not offer opinions on which causes people (and companies) should put money into. Also, keep in mind that you have ~zero skin in the game here, and Zoom has a lot, so you should lend a lot of credence to what they choose to do.
TopInvestor 6y ago
For anybody interested the following equipment works the best: 1) Oticon hearing aids + TV streaming device connected to iMac via audio interface. It streams the audio from the computer to the hearing aids . 2) Teams + captioning. In order the person needing to see the captioning to see it he has to initiate the meeting and sharing the link. The link never expires and could be saved in Notes from all members of the group. The members of the group needs to share the meeting time via other means for example email , text message. Compared to Zoom, Google meetups Team has superior video, audio and captioning capabilities. There are desktop and iOS versions of Teams. No way to use Otter reliably with hearing aid device because it requires Chrome browser and needs physical sound from the speakers to work. Internal networking the sound is not working. 3) Phone calls - CaptionCall. It is free service paid by the FEDeral government. You sign up and receive dedicated phone number which you enter in settings for call forwarding. When you are calling or somebody is calling you CaptionCall is intercepting the call and forwards it for machine learning+ person transcriber. This is the best combination. 4) Messaging across devices -WhastApp. No video or audio captioning in iOS so - using only messaging. Used for announcing Teams meeting. All other solutions do not do anything to accommodate-WebEx, BlueJeans, etc. Microsoft is having the best accommodation service - there is dedicated web site with free 24/7 support for people needing accommodation. One Teams account is just $5/month and the support is responding within several hours.
- qkeast 6y ago
  I love how many different approaches there are for setting things up! One quick note about Otter: I’m using LoopBack to create virtual audio devices that let me feed the audio as an input source as well as play it through an output channel. That might work with the hearing aids. (I use somewhat outdated Phonak Naida V SP’s – looking forward to the next gen that have better Bluetooth support.)
  - TopInvestor 6y ago
    With Otter it is complicated. It iMac needs the sound to be split but Safari is not allowing it. So they recommend Chrome and changing it’s settings. Then setting up aggregate device. But it is not working. The only way it is working is if the sound is also coming out from the speakers and the microphone is picking it up. Too complicated, there is a feedback and no streaming to the hearing aids. So Zoom + Otter is out of the picture. Teams has the captioning and the best quality. What happens is a lot of companies are demanding in using only Zoom. This is a misters why they just don’t use the link of the Teams invite. If they don’t have it installed it is working from the browser too.
bowyakka 6y ago
I am not deaf and I love captions and subtitles. I will often watch movies with them one, it might be that I grew up with them as my father is deaf; but I find they give me more information than speech alone.
- dheera 6y ago
  Me too, captions and subtitles allow me to watch videos while listening to music, or watch videos in public settings where I either didn't bring headphones or don't want to wear headphones, and allow me to watch 2 videos at the same time in which both of them are filled with 80% fluff and 20% content, as they usually are.
- tsomctl 6y ago
  The same. I can hear faint noises just fine, and hear background noise when listening to headphones. I think it's related to my poor verbal skills.
- veb 6y ago
  I've been in hospital recently after suffering a large oil burn to my left arm, and part of my chest. As most of us probably know, wards get very noisy. I only ever used my cochlear implant processor when I'd see the team of doctors first thing in the morning, otherwise I'd just chill and watch my laptop with captions on. Absolutely shocked me every time I'd turn my processor on and the world would roar into my ears. "How the fuck is anyone sleeping" I'd ask myself.
djsumdog 6y ago
I worked for a company where our accessibility engineer was blind. He once took us through his world; speakers setup so we could hear his screen reader and get a feel for how he navigates websites. I remember him starting the presentation saying, "Can everyone see this? Good because I can't."
- PopeDotNinja 6y ago
  > “Can everyone see this? Good because I can't." That is a powerful statement that requires no explanation. I love it.
matrix 6y ago
There's another really difficult challenge for hearing-impaired people not mentioned here: it's mentally exhausting to follow online meetings, even with captions. Hearing impaired people have to very intently while also trying to make sense of lagging/imperfect captions, and that's a high cognitive load to sustain for long periods. Accented English is particularly challenging, because otter.ai (used in Zoom) has very poor accuracy with the most common accents we encounter in software engineering.
- qkeast 6y ago
  Absolutely. This was actually something my team brought up—it was much more exhausting than usual, because it places such a heavier mental load on everyone. In my case at least, it’s still better than lip reading in large in-person meetings.
- pugworthy 6y ago
  100% this. Sometimes it’s like driving at night in a rainstorm on a twisty road with occasional on-coming traffic.
AcerbicZero 6y ago
I'm not deaf, but I don't care what most people say - so having better zoom transcripts would make my life easier.
aaron695 6y ago
> because I was relying on a transcript that was five seconds behind. I get it's about many things, but I don't understand why there is a 5 second lag on what is a solved problem. Solved decades ago. Is it patient concerns? This is also about a business issue, transcripts of meetings go past accessibility, so I don't get why between the two reasons this isn't solved.
Joakal 6y ago
1. Mobile phone 2. Google Live Transcribe app This is how I handle Zoom meetings as partially deaf. Its fairly accurate and plus you can use a second mobile too. Downside is that it will pick up everyone, including your voice.
- vidarh 6y ago
  My hearing is mostly fine, but I've looked for decent options to use for dictation, and Live Transcribe is the closest I've found to one with enough precision and speed to be tolerable to use as a replacement for typing...
- mercurywells 6y ago
  I do the exact same thing as well. Since I am a federal employee, I tried https://www.sprintrelay.com/federal https://www.sprintrelay.com/federal at first when we had dial-in conferences but it was hard at first - I requested that people start their sentences with their name and to whom they were talking like so: "This is Alice here, Bob, did you..". We moved to Zoomgov and it was hard at times to get captioning scheduled so I moved back to using my phone (which is what I used pre-covid at our in-person meetings) with Live Transcribe. We have the host with OneNote open and everyone has submitted notes so we know the topics that are going to be covered and can use it as sort of meeting minutes for anyone else that missed the meeting or to review what topics were covered.
zxcvbn4038 6y ago
The captions feature of Google Hangouts is great if you can't hear well, although sometimes it is akin to watching a "bad lip reading" video on You Tube which I'm sure nobody else notices because I'm the only one with them turned on. The TDD service hasn't changed since the '90s (1890? 1990? debatable) so I avoid it. It might have been amazing in the '60s but it is a punishment to use today compared to chat, messaging, e-mail, almost everything else. Most banks don't seem to get this and it is precious few that offer secure messaging as an option - First National Bank of Omaha is the best I've found. Citibank has excellent support via chat but all of their financial products are absolutely the worst and their fee structure should be considered usury. CapitalOne has amazing financial products but no provisions for the hard of hearing - if you send them a letter they will send you one right back saying "Call our 800 number" unless you explicitly write that you are writing them because you can't use the phone. Thanks, CapitalOne, really helpful. The absolute worst is Amalgamated Bank, as soon as they found out I couldn't hear they closed my account and sent me my funds via cashiers check - two months days later.
- whatatita 6y ago
  I'm not sure which ones are available in the USA but I've used a few different "New Banks" here in Europe and have had fantastic text-only conversations with banking staff. Monzo in the UK, and N26 elsewhere. (Looks like N26 is available in the US now too).
- Digit-Al 6y ago
  > The absolute worst is Amalgamated Bank, as soon as they found out I couldn't hear they closed my account and sent me my funds via cashiers check - two months days later. That's terrible. They wouldn't get away with that here in the UK. Discrimination against those with disabilities is illegal. If they tried that the banking ombudsman and the courts would come down on them like a ton of bricks.
tduchemin1 6y ago
I'm a (hearing) son in an all-deaf family, and am a bit tired to wait for every single service to become accessible. Why not just be platform-agnostic? It's the same problem that has been going on for non-captioned videos for years. If a captioning service is going to be exclusive to only Google Meet or Teams, then by definition, it's not inclusive. So when we come on Zoom with my parents, they use Ava http://www.ava.me http://www.ava.me to caption what I say with their speakers on. It looks like a caption bar, floating on top of the screen, so when I share my screen they can still see captions. My dad started using Ava at work where they use GoToMeeting. They just won't move to Zoom easily so he gets access without having to shift the whole company on it. The software also separates who says what neatly if you share a link in the chat and people connect to it. Also voices out what's typed on the other end.
- wtracy 6y ago
  I'm going to take this as an excuse to ask some questions about how the hearing impaired use video chat: How much does the video component help? I'd assume that most modern video chat solutions are adequate for sign language (but you know what they say about assumptions!). I've heard that reading lips over video is difficult. Is this a case where it's possible to read maybe half of what people say, or is it just impossible to read anything? What happens when a deaf person receives an unexpected call/message when they're not looking at their PC or handheld? Is vibration from a mobile device usually enough? Are there any visual systems for a desktop to signal the user at a distance? (I'm thinking of something like the flashing light alarm clocks.) Is communication via sign language over video chat feasible with a mobile device? I honestly don't know how much can be communicated with only one hand free. If one hand isn't enough, is propping the device up on a stable surface enough to be able to communicate this way? (Common sense says that at this point everyone would just be texting, but sometimes you just need that human connection.) I don't have any practical need for any of these answers. It's just something I've been curious about for a while.
  - tduchemin1 6y ago
    Ok a lot of education needed that go off topic :) We say deaf & hard-of-hearing please, not hearing-impaired. Lip reading is hard, period. Over video makes it harder when network connection isn’t great, and more people speak, so mostly difficult yeah. Flashes / vibration are common alerts yes. I prefer flash since you might not touch the surface that vibrates. And yes one-handed sign over video is very frequent but maybe best for 1-1 or familiar groups because indeed you can lose a bit in precision/fluidity. If you want to be accessible over video, find a stable place and sign with dark colored shirt so contrast is better ;)
timerol 6y ago
> For me, it was fascinating to see how our interactions changed over the course of the call. Everyone became more expressive in physical space. I found this to be extremely useful, even when talking to people with normal hearing on a video call. Because the call omits so much context that is obvious when talking in person, it helps to overact emotions, especially if you don't want to take valuable speaking bandwidth. (Or worse, talk over someone, which happens much less elegantly over video call.) I took to overacting pretty immediately in the beginning of lockdowns, but noticed that I was one of the few doing it. And I am still not sure how to broach that conversation with people. "Hi, I notice that you're acting normally on this video call. It would be best for you to comically overact your emotions so that people can get a read on how you are reacting." Some examples include nodding - moving almost from chin touching chest to staring at the ceiling, smiling - mouth wide enough to almost hurt, with a bit of space between the top and bottom rows of teeth, thumbs up - holding it right next to my head for 3+ seconds, and reconsidering something - hand over chin, almost covering mouth, with my entire head oriented up and away from the camera. I've gotten good feedback on it, so I don't think it's just me being weird. But it does sound odd now that I've written the examples out.
extra88 6y ago
FYI, Zoom is getting built-in automated live captions very soon. It will be produced by Otter.ai, which already produces the recording transcriptions. With 3rd party live captions, there’s an option to see all the text in a sidebar so I assume it will also be possible with their automated live captions. https://www.zdnet.com/article/zoom-meetings-you-can-now-add-live-captions-to-your-call-and-they-actually-work/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/zoom-meetings-you-can-now-add-...
shade 6y ago
This is a great article and being deaf myself, I have very similar experiences. Some thoughts... I'm a heavy Otter user and find it well worth the subscription - I used it a lot even in person, and have used it more since we all started working from home. We use Teams for most of our meetings and I always switch the captions on there; one or the other sometimes lags, but usually not both at once. For family video chats, we use Google Meet, and it's usually on par with Otter and Teams. I have read a lot of positive comments of Google's Live Transcribe and Recorder apps, but can't evaluate them since I'm an iPhone user. Between this and the other hearing a11y features in recent Pixel phones, and me having one foot out of the Apple ecosystem anyway, I give serious thought to switching to a Pixel almost every year and one of these days I'll actually do it. Worth mentioning: Google added the Pixel's Live Captions feature to Chrome and it's in the beta and main channels, but it's hidden behind a flag AND a setting, so you have to enable the flag, restart Chrome, and then confirm in settings that captions are turned on. I believe this is entirely on-device and it does work astonishingly well; I've used it on programming streams on Twitch and it handled the technical vocabulary better than I expected , if not flawlessly. A US-centric point I should mention: for companies above a certain size, the Americans with Disabilities Act requires that they make reasonable accommodations for you. I have done this in the past to have a professional captioner. They're more accurate, but inconvenient to schedule, usually have a bit more lag, and very expensive ($125 an hour was about average when I last had to get quotes for this). Not everyone wants to make the accuracy tradeoff and that's fine - I understand their position - though I'm personally willing to because it makes it very easy to jump on a call with a coworker whenever I need to. Quick notes on my setup: I have a 3.5mm splitter hanging off my work laptop's headphone jack. One side goes to a ReSound Multi-Mic (which includes a 3.5mm jack) to stream the audio to my hearing aid. The other side has a TRS-to-TRRS cable going into my iPhone (via the audio to lightning adapter) or iPad to provide an audio stream for Otter to work on. USB webcam provides the microphone. I typically use my iPad since I can set it up under the monitor my video call is running on and then I don't have to use screen space on my monitors to display the captions. I really should write up a blog post about all of this, with photos.
nshepperd 6y ago
> The team immediately spotted the tradeoffs: while Meet’s captions were built in, there’s no history, meaning each person had to dedicate their attention to the captions to make sure they didn’t miss anything. I actually wrote a js bookmarklet to solve this problem by continuously capturing the caption updates and writing them into a separate window. It's a little janky, but works (at least until Meet releases the next update that changes the obfuscated class names in the DOM). https://zlkj.in/bookmarklets#record-meet-captions https://zlkj.in/bookmarklets#record-meet-captions
LockAndLol 6y ago
I was expecting the article to be about sign language over video and whether it's a good experience or not. Does anybody here have experience with that and would they recommend it over captions? Also, for someone who picked up sign language later in life, how difficult has it been to learn in your experience? Would it be a viable option to have a whole company take sign language courses in order to help become more disability friendly or would that be too much of a time investment with little reward?
_nalply 6y ago
I am Deaf and I live in a country with diglossia. This means, transcripts fail if customers or colleagues switch to the other language (Swiss German, a bit like Dutch in being different from German). Additionally, there are sometimes customers talking in French or English. This means, video conferences usually don't work for me. I either correspond by email only or have a Signed Language interpreter or a human transcriptor. But nowadays I am quasi-retired anyway because of issues related to being limited in other ways and I am happy that way because I avoided some bullshit that comes with working for and with the corporate world since a few years. My quality of life has risen. I still program just out of fun and I found another niche: counseling in life and juridical questions for Deaf and HoH people, and the little money is welcome. You are welcome to ask here specific questions to avoid issues for Deaf and HoH people.
mdip 6y ago
I'm glad to see someone bringing these points up. I have been dealing with mild hearing loss for a little while now and have found Teams closed captioning to be extremely helpful, but my hearing is good enough that I usually manage fine on my own. My daughter is hard of hearing, requiring hearing aids for help. She also relies a lot on lip reading to disambiguate sounds that she has difficulty making out. We learned this year that her reliance on lip reading and visual cues was much more than we ever realized. In large groups of people, she relies on lip reading to help determine who the speaker is. When our school announced that it was doing "Zoom Meeting School"[0] and if classes resume in-person, mask wearing would be mandatory. It's tricky enough getting her accommodations at school -- and even with everything they offer, we knew that not being able to rely on lip-reading was going to put her at a huge disadvantage. We immediately enrolled our children in a local, public, online-only middle/high school. They have a few live-lessons a week, on Teams. The rest is reading, taking tests, writing papers and video-learning. Out of the two children who were moved to online school[1], our daughter had the easiest time adjusting, but all of them are doing better than they were in the traditional program[1]. We'd noticed a few years ago that she was the kid who would hop on YouTube and decide to randomly learn how to do something. I partly wonder if her having a harder time understanding teachers has caused her to discover that she's a more efficient learner when she controls how it's done. We were initially alarmed when the first month of classes went by and the kids were finishing a day of school in three to four hours, tops (Friday was 30 minutes!), but we were the only family in our neighborhood who left the district and by comparison, they're about a lesson ahead in everything and in addition to getting the best grades they've ever gotten, they actually know the material. It probably helps that my high-school son, who's getting into some pretty intense classes, has the benefit of 9 hours of sleep at night, and can start learning with an alert, wide-awake mind. Incredibly, both of my kids are still on the fence about going back to in-person. I think a few more months will change their minds. Their choices: (a) Wake up at 05:30 so you can look appropriate enough to avoid getting picked on, stand out in the cold waiting for a bus, spend 7 hours in an old, cinder-block building that has more design elements in common with a prison than a place designed to foster creativity and learning vs. (b) Wake up at ... whenever ... finish up 3-4 hours of work while having every convenience of home that isn't allowed at school and have the freedom to experience life for the hours your friends are covertly sleeping through Math class. [0] Our district has decided that the best approach to educating children is to simulate the classroom experience via a video call that the students must attend all day (with a two hour break). [1] I have an odd parenting situation; two of my kids are home-schooled (parent-directed without professional educators) and two are (now) in online public school through a local school district.
bostonvaulter2 6y ago
> Even sentence structure has changed: others have started to say names at the beginning of a sentence, rather than at the end. I think this is a great pattern to be using all the time in meetings, especially larger ones.

376 points by qkeast 6y ago

We have tried both Meet and Zoom for the ASL class I am taking. Both are fine until the instructor needs to present a powerpoint. Zoom stops showing everyone's video. Not sure if there is a difference between Zoom desktop app and Zoom chrome extension. For Meet, it is nice that the instructor can present from a tablet but there is no way to hid the presentation video so it is way too small to see everyone signing.

cstejerean 6y ago
If you have two screens for Zoom you can keep one screen for screen share and see everyone else on the other. I think there might be a way to turn on this dual window approach on a single screen too so you can control how much screen real estate each gets.
- saurik 6y ago
  Yeah: you can activate a floating gallery panel of video feeds.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  Only with the native app. The same one that intentionally bypassed Mac security.
Groxx 6y ago
It's a feature of Zoom, meetings can be set up to force presenter control. I'm not sure if there's a way to allow individuals to bypass it, but it is something the meeting-creator can turn off.
Schweigi 6y ago
With the Zoom desktop app you can click a button on the top right to switch the view. This allows you to see the presentation and the gallery view at the same time (make sure to have a recent app version). With the mouse you can resize the view between presentation and videos if you like to make the videos bigger.
zdragnar 6y ago
I am not a huge fan of a lot of Microsoft products, but I have been very pleasantly surprised by the Teams desktop app for video calls. With a decent sized screen, it seems to work pretty well at keeping everyone "present" on the screen, though I haven't experienced using it with people who only speak visually.
benjiweber 6y ago
Zoom also has an option to show the video in a second window to the shared screen if you enable multi screen mode. (You don't need two screens)
r00fus 6y ago
Zoom can show face video if you don't maximize the screen - the participants show up on top. Or use a 2nd monitor. Zoom was the first one to capitalize on 3 monitors - I've used a bidirectional share + participants on the 3rd screen.
- mercurywells 6y ago
  Yeah I just exit full-screen mode. Then I can see the screen + anyone with video on and chat.
- sand500 6y ago
  I don't think it shows everyone at once though? Which is pretty important in an ASL class. I only have the chrome extension which doesn't support popping videos out to separate monitors.

phendrenad2 6y ago

I've noticed that since everyone has gone remote, everyone wants to Zoom more. Things that could be a short discussion in Slack or a quick comment on a github PR are now a full-fledged Zoom meeting. I end up taking notes, which makes the meeting even more slow and awkward. If I were deaf, it would be impossible to do my job.

senkora 6y ago
I’m sure this differs across people and companies, but in my experience a one-on-one Zoom meeting is often faster than the slack discussion would be. It’s similar to walking over to your coworkers desk to chat for things that are too longwinded for slack but not worth a meeting.
- Gracana 6y ago
  However, it may be less convenient for them when you do that.
  - r00fus 6y ago
    So don't become Lumbergh from Office Space, and read the room/audience. Use at your own discretion. Same goes for using the /zoom in slack - if a back & forth is ensuing it may require a faster latency than slack can provide so a call which can upgrade to video/screenshare is nice.
    - Gracana 6y ago
      Oh, I'm the last one to start a call like that, because I know how bad it is to get stopped in your tracks and diverted when you're on a roll. Not that calls and conversations can't be useful, I just... don't like it when people think that's the only way to communicate.
- machello13 6y ago
  It's faster, but it's also (from my experience) a bit more taxing and often a bit draining. Unless it needs to be resolved quickly or it's a particularly complex issue, I much prefer the relaxed back-and-forth of a slack chat.

shalmanese 6y ago

I wonder if there's a way to build a video codec that does automatic lip detection and sends the lip data in much higher resolution than the rest of the stream?

qppo 6y ago
Video codecs already do this, to a degree. One of the key uses of wavelet transforms.
Retr0spectrum 6y ago
This is effectively what Nvidia Maxine claims to do.

retrac 6y ago

I'm on the flip-side of this. I have enough hearing that it is only sometimes a barrier. But I have an associated speech impediment. Voice recognition is always garbled.

GEBBL 6y ago

I am deaf too and I echo the sentiments of the article. I’ve found Microsoft teams vital for me as it has auto captions enabled. Zoom doesn’t have this, so we have shifted away from using zoom completely. Back in pre covid times, customer calls were done in a room over a conference speaker phone. I would be totally lost and would need to rely on my colleagues to help. With Microsoft teams, I can run customer calls myself, relying on the captions (and the patience of the customer). Massive thanks to Microsoft for spearheading accessibility. I hope you guys see this.

cddotdotslash 6y ago
One thing that might help you is the Google Recorder app. It has live speech to text and you can prop your phone next to your laptop running Zoom. It's not ideal but can help make the meeting a bit easier to follow.
- adinisom 6y ago
  Can confirm... a phone running Google's Live Transcribe propped up next to my laptop is even better for me than Google Meets captions because you can see the history. Will have to try Google Recorder.
pkaye 6y ago
I use hearing aids and there is still a bug in Microsoft Teams when you connect via Bluetooth. The ring tone is super loud despite adjusting volume. Other people have complained months back and it still is not resolved. Fortunately my hearing is good enough that I can put headphones on top of my hearing aids to avoid this problem.
- mleonhard 6y ago
  I have this problem with Bose SoundSport headphones and FaceTime Audio. The ring and answer tones are often painfully loud. Over three years and several firmware updates, it's still not fixed. I think Bose has become unable to focus on user experience. This is shown by: 1) their decision to remove physical buttons, 2) ignoring counterfeit products sold on Amazon, and 3) failing to make their $350 bluetooth headphones pause music when you take them off.

gbh444g 6y ago

Hi Quinn! Coincidentally, I've been working on a sound visualizer which accurately translates sound to visuals, while preserving all the information and, what's way more important, it transfers the "sound symmetry" which we often refer to as "musical harmony". The visuals can be translated back to sound. As someone with nearly perfect hearing and musical education background, I find the visuals oddly accurate when I also listen to the corresponding music. It can trivially distinguish human vowels, as those produce different recognizable shapes. I've put together a few sample images and a live demo: check out "github soundshader" (the project that talks about ACFs). I'm really curious what you think about this.

codetrotter 6y ago
Clickable link https://github.com/soundshader/soundshader.github.io https://github.com/soundshader/soundshader.github.io
yorwba 6y ago
Is there a reason you don't just link directly to https://soundshader.github.io/ https://soundshader.github.io/ or https://github.com/soundshader/soundshader.github.io https://github.com/soundshader/soundshader.github.io ?
- gbh444g 6y ago
  I tried doing just that not so long ago: HN promptly shadowbanned my account and my IP address.
  - yorwba 6y ago
    If you send an email to hn@ycombinator.com the mods fix false positives like that pretty quickly.
    - whatatita 6y ago
      Is this documented somewhere?

centimeter 6y ago

"we need to make work more inclusive for people living with disabilites" - statements like this are pretty popular, and they sound nice to the first order. However, I have never once seen a statement like this accompanied by a utilitarian/economic analysis of whether this would actually be socially beneficial given the (usually) small number of people involved compared to the (often) large cost of making the change. And whenever someone says "would this really be worth it", responses vary from "Wow, why do you hate the disabled?" to "You should be glad you're not disabled" - in any case, shaming the person asking this question rather than addressing the (reasonable) question. About 2 in 1000 people in the US are deaf, and most of those are deaf due to old age, so they are not working anymore. I think it's very unlikely that the marginal optimum is to spend more money optimizing for this subset of users.

jonpurdy 6y ago
I would assume that there usually isn't an immediate economic benefit of doing so. Fortunately, we live in a society that is much more inclusive than it used to be. As Tim Cook said, "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI". Aside from the monetary benefits (or lack thereof), if one product focuses on accessibility and another doesn't, the small subset of users who need those features may encourage or force a larger number of users to use the more accessible product. So long-term, I think there is a benefit, even aside from helping make society more inclusive.
- centimeter 6y ago
  This sort of commentary betrays a stiflingly first-order thought process. Sure, being "more inclusive" is a benefit - this is included in any utilitarian or economic analysis of the change. However, instead of spending X marginal dollars being more inclusive to deaf people, you could also spend that money on any number of other outcomes (pick your pleasant-sounding cause: cancer research, homeless outreach, just making everyday people's lives a bit better). If you don't understand how "monetary benefits" tie in to scalable social optimization, you should probably not offer opinions on which causes people (and companies) should put money into. Also, keep in mind that you have ~zero skin in the game here, and Zoom has a lot, so you should lend a lot of credence to what they choose to do.

TopInvestor 6y ago

For anybody interested the following equipment works the best: 1) Oticon hearing aids + TV streaming device connected to iMac via audio interface. It streams the audio from the computer to the hearing aids . 2) Teams + captioning. In order the person needing to see the captioning to see it he has to initiate the meeting and sharing the link. The link never expires and could be saved in Notes from all members of the group. The members of the group needs to share the meeting time via other means for example email , text message. Compared to Zoom, Google meetups Team has superior video, audio and captioning capabilities. There are desktop and iOS versions of Teams. No way to use Otter reliably with hearing aid device because it requires Chrome browser and needs physical sound from the speakers to work. Internal networking the sound is not working. 3) Phone calls - CaptionCall. It is free service paid by the FEDeral government. You sign up and receive dedicated phone number which you enter in settings for call forwarding. When you are calling or somebody is calling you CaptionCall is intercepting the call and forwards it for machine learning+ person transcriber. This is the best combination. 4) Messaging across devices -WhastApp. No video or audio captioning in iOS so - using only messaging. Used for announcing Teams meeting. All other solutions do not do anything to accommodate-WebEx, BlueJeans, etc. Microsoft is having the best accommodation service - there is dedicated web site with free 24/7 support for people needing accommodation. One Teams account is just $5/month and the support is responding within several hours.

qkeast 6y ago
I love how many different approaches there are for setting things up! One quick note about Otter: I’m using LoopBack to create virtual audio devices that let me feed the audio as an input source as well as play it through an output channel. That might work with the hearing aids. (I use somewhat outdated Phonak Naida V SP’s – looking forward to the next gen that have better Bluetooth support.)
- TopInvestor 6y ago
  With Otter it is complicated. It iMac needs the sound to be split but Safari is not allowing it. So they recommend Chrome and changing it’s settings. Then setting up aggregate device. But it is not working. The only way it is working is if the sound is also coming out from the speakers and the microphone is picking it up. Too complicated, there is a feedback and no streaming to the hearing aids. So Zoom + Otter is out of the picture. Teams has the captioning and the best quality. What happens is a lot of companies are demanding in using only Zoom. This is a misters why they just don’t use the link of the Teams invite. If they don’t have it installed it is working from the browser too.

bowyakka 6y ago

I am not deaf and I love captions and subtitles. I will often watch movies with them one, it might be that I grew up with them as my father is deaf; but I find they give me more information than speech alone.

dheera 6y ago
Me too, captions and subtitles allow me to watch videos while listening to music, or watch videos in public settings where I either didn't bring headphones or don't want to wear headphones, and allow me to watch 2 videos at the same time in which both of them are filled with 80% fluff and 20% content, as they usually are.
tsomctl 6y ago
The same. I can hear faint noises just fine, and hear background noise when listening to headphones. I think it's related to my poor verbal skills.
veb 6y ago
I've been in hospital recently after suffering a large oil burn to my left arm, and part of my chest. As most of us probably know, wards get very noisy. I only ever used my cochlear implant processor when I'd see the team of doctors first thing in the morning, otherwise I'd just chill and watch my laptop with captions on. Absolutely shocked me every time I'd turn my processor on and the world would roar into my ears. "How the fuck is anyone sleeping" I'd ask myself.

djsumdog 6y ago

I worked for a company where our accessibility engineer was blind. He once took us through his world; speakers setup so we could hear his screen reader and get a feel for how he navigates websites. I remember him starting the presentation saying, "Can everyone see this? Good because I can't."

PopeDotNinja 6y ago
> “Can everyone see this? Good because I can't." That is a powerful statement that requires no explanation. I love it.

matrix 6y ago

There's another really difficult challenge for hearing-impaired people not mentioned here: it's mentally exhausting to follow online meetings, even with captions. Hearing impaired people have to very intently while also trying to make sense of lagging/imperfect captions, and that's a high cognitive load to sustain for long periods. Accented English is particularly challenging, because otter.ai (used in Zoom) has very poor accuracy with the most common accents we encounter in software engineering.

qkeast 6y ago
Absolutely. This was actually something my team brought up—it was much more exhausting than usual, because it places such a heavier mental load on everyone. In my case at least, it’s still better than lip reading in large in-person meetings.
pugworthy 6y ago
100% this. Sometimes it’s like driving at night in a rainstorm on a twisty road with occasional on-coming traffic.

AcerbicZero 6y ago

I'm not deaf, but I don't care what most people say - so having better zoom transcripts would make my life easier.

aaron695 6y ago

> because I was relying on a transcript that was five seconds behind. I get it's about many things, but I don't understand why there is a 5 second lag on what is a solved problem. Solved decades ago. Is it patient concerns? This is also about a business issue, transcripts of meetings go past accessibility, so I don't get why between the two reasons this isn't solved.

Joakal 6y ago

1. Mobile phone 2. Google Live Transcribe app This is how I handle Zoom meetings as partially deaf. Its fairly accurate and plus you can use a second mobile too. Downside is that it will pick up everyone, including your voice.

vidarh 6y ago
My hearing is mostly fine, but I've looked for decent options to use for dictation, and Live Transcribe is the closest I've found to one with enough precision and speed to be tolerable to use as a replacement for typing...
mercurywells 6y ago
I do the exact same thing as well. Since I am a federal employee, I tried https://www.sprintrelay.com/federal https://www.sprintrelay.com/federal at first when we had dial-in conferences but it was hard at first - I requested that people start their sentences with their name and to whom they were talking like so: "This is Alice here, Bob, did you..". We moved to Zoomgov and it was hard at times to get captioning scheduled so I moved back to using my phone (which is what I used pre-covid at our in-person meetings) with Live Transcribe. We have the host with OneNote open and everyone has submitted notes so we know the topics that are going to be covered and can use it as sort of meeting minutes for anyone else that missed the meeting or to review what topics were covered.

zxcvbn4038 6y ago

The captions feature of Google Hangouts is great if you can't hear well, although sometimes it is akin to watching a "bad lip reading" video on You Tube which I'm sure nobody else notices because I'm the only one with them turned on. The TDD service hasn't changed since the '90s (1890? 1990? debatable) so I avoid it. It might have been amazing in the '60s but it is a punishment to use today compared to chat, messaging, e-mail, almost everything else. Most banks don't seem to get this and it is precious few that offer secure messaging as an option - First National Bank of Omaha is the best I've found. Citibank has excellent support via chat but all of their financial products are absolutely the worst and their fee structure should be considered usury. CapitalOne has amazing financial products but no provisions for the hard of hearing - if you send them a letter they will send you one right back saying "Call our 800 number" unless you explicitly write that you are writing them because you can't use the phone. Thanks, CapitalOne, really helpful. The absolute worst is Amalgamated Bank, as soon as they found out I couldn't hear they closed my account and sent me my funds via cashiers check - two months days later.

whatatita 6y ago
I'm not sure which ones are available in the USA but I've used a few different "New Banks" here in Europe and have had fantastic text-only conversations with banking staff. Monzo in the UK, and N26 elsewhere. (Looks like N26 is available in the US now too).
Digit-Al 6y ago
> The absolute worst is Amalgamated Bank, as soon as they found out I couldn't hear they closed my account and sent me my funds via cashiers check - two months days later. That's terrible. They wouldn't get away with that here in the UK. Discrimination against those with disabilities is illegal. If they tried that the banking ombudsman and the courts would come down on them like a ton of bricks.

tduchemin1 6y ago

I'm a (hearing) son in an all-deaf family, and am a bit tired to wait for every single service to become accessible. Why not just be platform-agnostic? It's the same problem that has been going on for non-captioned videos for years. If a captioning service is going to be exclusive to only Google Meet or Teams, then by definition, it's not inclusive. So when we come on Zoom with my parents, they use Ava http://www.ava.me http://www.ava.me to caption what I say with their speakers on. It looks like a caption bar, floating on top of the screen, so when I share my screen they can still see captions. My dad started using Ava at work where they use GoToMeeting. They just won't move to Zoom easily so he gets access without having to shift the whole company on it. The software also separates who says what neatly if you share a link in the chat and people connect to it. Also voices out what's typed on the other end.

wtracy 6y ago
I'm going to take this as an excuse to ask some questions about how the hearing impaired use video chat: How much does the video component help? I'd assume that most modern video chat solutions are adequate for sign language (but you know what they say about assumptions!). I've heard that reading lips over video is difficult. Is this a case where it's possible to read maybe half of what people say, or is it just impossible to read anything? What happens when a deaf person receives an unexpected call/message when they're not looking at their PC or handheld? Is vibration from a mobile device usually enough? Are there any visual systems for a desktop to signal the user at a distance? (I'm thinking of something like the flashing light alarm clocks.) Is communication via sign language over video chat feasible with a mobile device? I honestly don't know how much can be communicated with only one hand free. If one hand isn't enough, is propping the device up on a stable surface enough to be able to communicate this way? (Common sense says that at this point everyone would just be texting, but sometimes you just need that human connection.) I don't have any practical need for any of these answers. It's just something I've been curious about for a while.
- tduchemin1 6y ago
  Ok a lot of education needed that go off topic :) We say deaf & hard-of-hearing please, not hearing-impaired. Lip reading is hard, period. Over video makes it harder when network connection isn’t great, and more people speak, so mostly difficult yeah. Flashes / vibration are common alerts yes. I prefer flash since you might not touch the surface that vibrates. And yes one-handed sign over video is very frequent but maybe best for 1-1 or familiar groups because indeed you can lose a bit in precision/fluidity. If you want to be accessible over video, find a stable place and sign with dark colored shirt so contrast is better ;)

timerol 6y ago

> For me, it was fascinating to see how our interactions changed over the course of the call. Everyone became more expressive in physical space. I found this to be extremely useful, even when talking to people with normal hearing on a video call. Because the call omits so much context that is obvious when talking in person, it helps to overact emotions, especially if you don't want to take valuable speaking bandwidth. (Or worse, talk over someone, which happens much less elegantly over video call.) I took to overacting pretty immediately in the beginning of lockdowns, but noticed that I was one of the few doing it. And I am still not sure how to broach that conversation with people. "Hi, I notice that you're acting normally on this video call. It would be best for you to comically overact your emotions so that people can get a read on how you are reacting." Some examples include nodding - moving almost from chin touching chest to staring at the ceiling, smiling - mouth wide enough to almost hurt, with a bit of space between the top and bottom rows of teeth, thumbs up - holding it right next to my head for 3+ seconds, and reconsidering something - hand over chin, almost covering mouth, with my entire head oriented up and away from the camera. I've gotten good feedback on it, so I don't think it's just me being weird. But it does sound odd now that I've written the examples out.

extra88 6y ago

FYI, Zoom is getting built-in automated live captions very soon. It will be produced by Otter.ai, which already produces the recording transcriptions. With 3rd party live captions, there’s an option to see all the text in a sidebar so I assume it will also be possible with their automated live captions. https://www.zdnet.com/article/zoom-meetings-you-can-now-add-live-captions-to-your-call-and-they-actually-work/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/zoom-meetings-you-can-now-add-...

shade 6y ago

This is a great article and being deaf myself, I have very similar experiences. Some thoughts... I'm a heavy Otter user and find it well worth the subscription - I used it a lot even in person, and have used it more since we all started working from home. We use Teams for most of our meetings and I always switch the captions on there; one or the other sometimes lags, but usually not both at once. For family video chats, we use Google Meet, and it's usually on par with Otter and Teams. I have read a lot of positive comments of Google's Live Transcribe and Recorder apps, but can't evaluate them since I'm an iPhone user. Between this and the other hearing a11y features in recent Pixel phones, and me having one foot out of the Apple ecosystem anyway, I give serious thought to switching to a Pixel almost every year and one of these days I'll actually do it. Worth mentioning: Google added the Pixel's Live Captions feature to Chrome and it's in the beta and main channels, but it's hidden behind a flag AND a setting, so you have to enable the flag, restart Chrome, and then confirm in settings that captions are turned on. I believe this is entirely on-device and it does work astonishingly well; I've used it on programming streams on Twitch and it handled the technical vocabulary better than I expected , if not flawlessly. A US-centric point I should mention: for companies above a certain size, the Americans with Disabilities Act requires that they make reasonable accommodations for you. I have done this in the past to have a professional captioner. They're more accurate, but inconvenient to schedule, usually have a bit more lag, and very expensive ($125 an hour was about average when I last had to get quotes for this). Not everyone wants to make the accuracy tradeoff and that's fine - I understand their position - though I'm personally willing to because it makes it very easy to jump on a call with a coworker whenever I need to. Quick notes on my setup: I have a 3.5mm splitter hanging off my work laptop's headphone jack. One side goes to a ReSound Multi-Mic (which includes a 3.5mm jack) to stream the audio to my hearing aid. The other side has a TRS-to-TRRS cable going into my iPhone (via the audio to lightning adapter) or iPad to provide an audio stream for Otter to work on. USB webcam provides the microphone. I typically use my iPad since I can set it up under the monitor my video call is running on and then I don't have to use screen space on my monitors to display the captions. I really should write up a blog post about all of this, with photos.

nshepperd 6y ago

> The team immediately spotted the tradeoffs: while Meet’s captions were built in, there’s no history, meaning each person had to dedicate their attention to the captions to make sure they didn’t miss anything. I actually wrote a js bookmarklet to solve this problem by continuously capturing the caption updates and writing them into a separate window. It's a little janky, but works (at least until Meet releases the next update that changes the obfuscated class names in the DOM). https://zlkj.in/bookmarklets#record-meet-captions https://zlkj.in/bookmarklets#record-meet-captions

LockAndLol 6y ago

I was expecting the article to be about sign language over video and whether it's a good experience or not. Does anybody here have experience with that and would they recommend it over captions? Also, for someone who picked up sign language later in life, how difficult has it been to learn in your experience? Would it be a viable option to have a whole company take sign language courses in order to help become more disability friendly or would that be too much of a time investment with little reward?

_nalply 6y ago

I am Deaf and I live in a country with diglossia. This means, transcripts fail if customers or colleagues switch to the other language (Swiss German, a bit like Dutch in being different from German). Additionally, there are sometimes customers talking in French or English. This means, video conferences usually don't work for me. I either correspond by email only or have a Signed Language interpreter or a human transcriptor. But nowadays I am quasi-retired anyway because of issues related to being limited in other ways and I am happy that way because I avoided some bullshit that comes with working for and with the corporate world since a few years. My quality of life has risen. I still program just out of fun and I found another niche: counseling in life and juridical questions for Deaf and HoH people, and the little money is welcome. You are welcome to ask here specific questions to avoid issues for Deaf and HoH people.

mdip 6y ago

I'm glad to see someone bringing these points up. I have been dealing with mild hearing loss for a little while now and have found Teams closed captioning to be extremely helpful, but my hearing is good enough that I usually manage fine on my own. My daughter is hard of hearing, requiring hearing aids for help. She also relies a lot on lip reading to disambiguate sounds that she has difficulty making out. We learned this year that her reliance on lip reading and visual cues was much more than we ever realized. In large groups of people, she relies on lip reading to help determine who the speaker is. When our school announced that it was doing "Zoom Meeting School"[0] and if classes resume in-person, mask wearing would be mandatory. It's tricky enough getting her accommodations at school -- and even with everything they offer, we knew that not being able to rely on lip-reading was going to put her at a huge disadvantage. We immediately enrolled our children in a local, public, online-only middle/high school. They have a few live-lessons a week, on Teams. The rest is reading, taking tests, writing papers and video-learning. Out of the two children who were moved to online school[1], our daughter had the easiest time adjusting, but all of them are doing better than they were in the traditional program[1]. We'd noticed a few years ago that she was the kid who would hop on YouTube and decide to randomly learn how to do something. I partly wonder if her having a harder time understanding teachers has caused her to discover that she's a more efficient learner when she controls how it's done. We were initially alarmed when the first month of classes went by and the kids were finishing a day of school in three to four hours, tops (Friday was 30 minutes!), but we were the only family in our neighborhood who left the district and by comparison, they're about a lesson ahead in everything and in addition to getting the best grades they've ever gotten, they actually know the material. It probably helps that my high-school son, who's getting into some pretty intense classes, has the benefit of 9 hours of sleep at night, and can start learning with an alert, wide-awake mind. Incredibly, both of my kids are still on the fence about going back to in-person. I think a few more months will change their minds. Their choices: (a) Wake up at 05:30 so you can look appropriate enough to avoid getting picked on, stand out in the cold waiting for a bus, spend 7 hours in an old, cinder-block building that has more design elements in common with a prison than a place designed to foster creativity and learning vs. (b) Wake up at ... whenever ... finish up 3-4 hours of work while having every convenience of home that isn't allowed at school and have the freedom to experience life for the hours your friends are covertly sleeping through Math class. [0] Our district has decided that the best approach to educating children is to simulate the classroom experience via a video call that the students must attend all day (with a two hour break). [1] I have an odd parenting situation; two of my kids are home-schooled (parent-directed without professional educators) and two are (now) in online public school through a local school district.

bostonvaulter2 6y ago

> Even sentence structure has changed: others have started to say names at the beginning of a sentence, rather than at the end. I think this is a great pattern to be using all the time in meetings, especially larger ones.