Escapees January-February 2024

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RVer with Hearing Loss Volunteers withNPS

In June 2022 I began a new life chapter vol unteering with the National Park Services (NPS). Little did I know how much this would impact my life in positive ways. Not only was I living a dream life inside the Grand Teton National Park surrounded by glori ous mountains, wildlife galore and awesome sceneries, I experienced communicating on the telephone in an entirely new way. I was assigned to the Grand Teton National Park (GTNP) "lost and found department" inside headquar ters. One of my primary responsibilities is to match found items with their owners, the park visitors. This required using the GTNP business telephone system. Even though I’ve had many years of experience working in the telecommunications fi eld, I was still apprehensive

about having a conversation using the telephone. You see, I lost my hearing in both ears due to illness when I was fi ve-years old. I am completely deaf in my right ear and have a severe hearing loss in my left ear. Luckily, with the assistance of a hearing aid in my left ear, I’m able to function as a hard-of-hearing person. I rely heavily on lip-reading as well as other assistive technol ogies. One of the signi fi cant technologies to come along in years is automated speech recognition (ASR). CaptionMate and Automated Speech Recognition CaptionMate (CM) developed a platform that allows persons with hearing loss to communicate on the cell phone using ASR which captions the conversation so the user can both read and listen using Bluetooth technology. Visit this link to see a brief video on how it works: https://captionmate.com/en/howitworks/ howitworks. During my fi rst few days on the job, I communicated with the CM team, who were awesome

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ESCAPEES Magazine January/February 2024