How hearing loops spread across Lane County

Hearing loops are an assistive listening device that can significantly reduce background noise for hearing aid users. The device is relatively simple: a loop of copper wire encircles a desk, room or entire building, creating a magnetic field. People within that field can activate a particular setting on their hearing aids that allows sound from a microphone to be transmitted directly into their ears.

Hearing loops are still gaining traction in the U.S., but the city of Eugene has looped nearly 60 locations, from hotel front desks to entire performance halls. As reported in KLCC, Travel Lane County was recently recognized by the Hearing Loss Association of America for its work to install hearing loops across the county.

Andy Vobora is the vice president of stakeholder relations at Travel Lane County. Ginevra Ralph and Sue Prichard are the co-chairs of the advocacy group Loop Oregon. They join us to talk about looping, its implementation in the county and the difference it makes for people who are hard of hearing.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Hearing loops are an assistive listening device that can significantly reduce background noise for people who are hard of hearing. They let people activate a setting on their hearing aids that allow sound from a microphone to be transmitted directly into their ears. Hearing loops are still gaining traction in the U.S., but the city of Eugene has looped nearly 60 locations. To put that in perspective, an advocacy group found that Portland only has four. As reported recently by KLCC, Travel Lane County received national recognition for its work. Andy Vobora is a vice president of stakeholder relations at Travel Lane County. Ginevra Ralph and Sue Prichard are the co-chairs of the advocacy group Loop Oregon. They all join us now. It’s great to have all three of you on the show.

Ginevra Ralph: Thank you.

Andy Vobora: Thank you.

Miller: Sue Prichard, first. Can you explain what a hearing loop is and how it works?

Sue Prichard: Well, it’s actually not as complicated as one might think. It’s a very simple technology. It involves having a copper wire in the floor of the space that you are looping. It involves attaching that to an amplifier of some sort. It involves having a microphone that a person speaks into and then it involves having your hearing aids equipped with telecoils, which is a tiny little copper wire. So those are the four essential pieces of it. And it’s actually overwhelmingly wonderful and positive and inspiring to take advantage of this technology.

Miller: How does using a hearing loop compare to other assisted devices like an FM signal or infrared? These are, as I understand it, other systems that a building owner could put into their building, could retrofit or build to begin with. How do loops compare?

Prichard: Well, that’s a good question. The difference between the hearing loop and the other systems is that the hearing loop does not require anything other than just your hearing aids and the system built into the building. An FM system or an infrared system requires the patron or the guest to check out other equipment to use in order to access the system. So it’s more cumbersome. It’s awkward. It sets you aside as having a disability, which a lot of people really don’t want to admit. So it’s just a big difference in terms of ease of use and also just a maintenance subsystem.

Miller: Can you describe the first time you actually used the hearing loop system?

Prichard: I sure can. I cried. When you’re hard of hearing and you’ve gone along for many, many years as I did, for 28 years or so before I actually experienced this, you get used to the fact that sound is muddled and unclear. Speech is unclear. You might hear the volume but you don’t hear the clarity. You can’t really understand the words that people are saying. So the first time I experienced a hearing loop, I was standing in the ticket office of The Shedd and it was just overwhelming. It’s just, to be able to hear sounds so clearly and to understand all of the words is really a very moving experience.

Miller: You mentioned The Shedd, The Shedd Institute for the Arts, and Ginevra Ralph, one of our other guests, is the director of cultural and community services there.

Ginevra, you’ve also been a long-time disability advocate. Before you got involved in this current work that you’re here to talk with us about, how much attention had you paid to hearing or to people who are hard of hearing?

Ralph: That’s another great question. My background was with kids and adults with the most profound disabilities, cognitive and physical disabilities. We had virtually no training in hearing loss or signed exact English, ways to communicate, because it’s not just about hearing. It really is about this communication issue. And when I started to find out that people like Sue couldn’t hear, couldn’t comprehend, couldn’t understand, couldn’t use this quote, “state of the art FM system” we had installed in the 2000s in our concert hall and that it wasn’t working, it was worthless. The disability side of me kicked in and said this doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make business sense, but it doesn’t make humanitarian sense.

One of the things, Dave, is that 50 million Americans have an estimated hearing loss. The other 250 million of us don’t understand hearing loss. They don’t understand how hard it is, how tiring it is. They don’t understand that it’s not about volume. It’s about clarity, and virtually nobody understands this issue that you’re bringing up so well around assisted listening. A hearing aid or a cochlear implant is an aid just like a wheelchair. Wheelchair users need elevators, they need ramps going to any church, any public place like The Shedd or the Schnitz or anything. You need additional equipment and you need an assisted listening system. And it’s required by the ADA.

Miller: Andy Vobora, as I mentioned, you’re joining us from Travel Lane County. How did your organization get involved with Loop Oregon?

Vobora: Well, it’s because of the two guests you’ve just been talking to. Ginevra and Sue inspired us with the work they were doing around The Shedd. And as a destination marketing organization, we love to talk about The Shedd and when we heard about the work that was done there to make the concert hall accessible to all residents and visitors and ensure a great experience for all of them, we got really excited about [it], we gave them an award here a couple of years ago. And so that stuck in the back of my mind and I was really interested in it. And then lo and behold, about a year ago, I got my own hearing aids and got to experience a hearing loop. And so…

Miller: What was that like for you when you got to… So you’d already been working on this and then you got a hearing aid for the first time. Do you remember the first time you turned it on, this particular feature?

Vobora: Yes. And my hearing loss is somewhat minimal. But, as Sue said, in certain situations, it’s very difficult… rooms full of people. In this particular case, my first experience was at the Cottage Theater down in Cottage Grove. And in the performance was a play with actors from a very young age to older age and lots of movement on the stage. And so it’s really easy to miss dialogue. And with that, it was clear as a bell and I even had my wife leaning over to me asking me what one of the actors said when she missed something. So it was, as Sue mentioned, a moving experience in terms of just being able to hear all those things as well as everybody else. So that’s what got me excited about it.

And we went down the road of budgeting some funds in our budget, to get a little program started. And then we’re boosted by an accessibility grant, through Travel Oregon that we were able to extend the work we did over the past year.

Miller: What kinds of barriers or hurdles did you come across as you tried to get this technology to be taken up around the county?

Vobora: Well, one of the things we did is we met with Sue and Ginevra and Loop Lane, at that time and happy to hear they’re now Loop Oregon and working their magic all over the state. But we talked to them and we said, from a visitor standpoint, we have a very limited amount of money. What’s the best use of that money? And so we thought one of the first experiences of a visitor is at a hotel front desk. If you can’t have good information being exchanged at the hotel front desk, somebody’s off to a bad start on their experience here. The technology that has been talked about so far today involving the loop and everything is a little bit different in the case of a front desk, where you can create that magnetic field with a loop that actually just sits on the counter of the hotel front desk. It acts as the international symbol for having a hearing loop, but it is actually the loop and it’s wired to an amplifier underneath the counter. And then the desk clerk just speaks into it and you have a great conversation. They’re very inexpensive.

And initially, there wasn’t a lot of pushback and a lot of challenges. A few people had questions about, what does it take to keep it up and running, or is there a lot of training involved? And literally, it’s installed. The assessment is a 30-minute assessment. Most of the time it’s about a 30-minute installation, there’s virtually no training other than the fact, “hey desk clerk, please speak into the microphone.” And because you turn it on and it stays on. So, once we got that information out, it was a pretty easy sell with a lot of our hotels.

Then we lost a little momentum but we decided to open up the project to some bigger venues, because we had seen the great benefits at The Shedd, the Cottage Theater and other community venues. And so we were able to work with some museums and other performance venues. There’s a range of opportunities for businesses to plug into this type of technology and make it available, and it’s so needed.

Miller: Sue, I talked to a friend who has used hearing aids for many years and they didn’t know that hearing loops existed, first of all, and they also were pretty sure that their small hearing aids don’t have a button that would connect to these loops. How common do you think that is for people who themselves have hearing aids but are completely unaware of this technology?

Prichard: Well, it is painfully more common than it should be and it’s something that we are battling with all the time. I personally, myself, didn’t really understand what a telecoil or hearing loop was until about my sixth set of hearing aids. I think one of the challenges that we have is that the audiology professionals have hard jobs. It’s difficult to assess what people can handle in terms of technology and complexity. So I think they often tend to not overwhelm or they’re afraid of overwhelming patients with too much technology, because frankly getting hearing aids initially is a challenge. It does take some real personal strength and dedication to adapt to them.

Miller: Is it also the case that they have to be larger in order to actually have this capability?

Prichard: Well, that’s a myth really because it’s so infinitesimally smaller or larger that it just really doesn’t make any difference. And if people knew what they could access and how much their experience, their life experiences could be improved by having access to these different assisted lifting systems, then everybody would want it. But unfortunately, most people are not told. And the sad part is that putting a telecoil in a hearing aid actually enables a patient to access all three of the assistive listening systems. So it’s a disservice to the patients that they are not instructed about these assistive listening systems and that they don’t understand what is available to them. It’s one of our biggest frustrations.

Miller: Ginevra, as we heard from Andy, your organization used to be called Loop Lane. Now, it is much more of a statewide name, Loop Oregon.

Ralph: Well, we keep getting inquiries from around the state. There’s a huge amount of work happening down in Medford, an incredibly active group down there putting loops into medical facilities. So we’re working on the idea of templates. A medical office needs to have something at the reception desk, in the waiting area, and then in the exam room and one is just as much like another and it all is part of HIPAA and pharmacies and that sort of thing. So there’s small loops and big loops. And what I would say is one of the reasons we adopted the Loop Oregon is because Google Maps is letting us identify where hearing loops are and putting it on the map, literally. And so I could use help out of Portland. There have to be more than four loops. I need somebody to tell me where they are and verify that they’re operational. And then we’ll add Portland to the loop list as well.

Miller: And I should say we’re out of time, but get in touch with Sue Prichard if you know of loops anywhere in Oregon, I guess, and Ginevra Ralph. Ginevra, Sue and Andy, thanks very much for joining me. I really appreciate it.

All: Thank you.

Miller: Ginevra Ralph and Sue Prichard are the co-chairs of Loop Oregon. Andy Vobora is vice president of stakeholder relations at Travel Lane County.

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