Organization
Oportun
Hearing Profile
Hard-of-hearing
Location
Orlando, Florida
Hi, my name is Lisa Moreno. I am hard of hearing and I also work in marketing. Last year. I had a cochlear implant surgery.
Since COVID-19 started in March 2020, I have faced many challenges, especially communication challenges. For example I had to deal with conference calls for work that have increased. We have them much more and with more people — sometimes over 20 people are on the calls and it has been making it harder to understand.
Now everyone has to wear masks and that makes me unable to see lips to understand conversations. For me now it's even harder to go out to do some errands than it was before. It's very stressful and very challenging.
I'm not looking forward to going back to an office setting where I'll find my co-workers with those masks. It's gonna be very difficult for me to understand conversations. I'm also not looking forward to go out to restaurants and socialize all of those situations.
Being hard-of-hearing or Deaf is very challenging right now. It make us carry lots of stress. We need to plan every single communication circulation to feel comfortable about and it's definitely a big challenge for us.
I use Ava for really for work conference calls. It helps me understand the conversations with context. My Zoom meetings usually have closed captions activated, but they don't work as well as Ava.
Since I'm bilingual, I switch between English and Spanish and with Ava I can switch between them easily. My coworkers who aren't bilingual can even use the translation feature to follow along on the conversation.
Ava has really helped me a lot during this COVID-19 time. It has allowed me to understand more of my conference calls.