Sloping Hearing Loss

Sloping hearing loss is a common audiogram shape in which hearing thresholds are relatively preserved at low frequencies and progressively worse at higher frequencies, producing a downward slope on the audiogram. It is the typical presentation of age-related hearing loss (presbycusis) and of noise-induced hearing loss, and has direct accessibility consequences: high-frequency consonants — 's', 'f', 'th', 'sh' — carry much of the phonemic information in speech and are disproportionately lost, so a person with sloping loss may hear voices but struggle to distinguish words. This is why standardised hearing simulations often use mild/moderate/severe sloping profiles as representative test cases, and why accessibility captioning, amplification with high-frequency emphasis, and good speaker audio hygiene all matter for an audience that includes older users.