Autoethnography of a Hard of Hearing Traveler
Dhruv Jain, Audrey Desjardins, Leah Findlater, Jon E. Froehlich · 2019 · Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS) · doi:10.1145/3308561.3353800
Summary
This paper presents a 2.5-year autoethnographic account of the recreational travel experiences of Jain, a hard of hearing individual with severe-to-profound bilateral sensorineural hearing loss who wears behind-the-ear hearing aids. The account draws on retrospective journals and field notes covering a 15-month solo backpacking trip across 21 countries (June 2016 - August 2017) and 16 months of occasional travel as a PhD student (September 2017 - December 2018), comprising 47 documented travel events totaling 15,288 words. Five major themes emerged through thematic analysis using open, axial, and selective coding. The influence of environmental factors revealed three recurring challenges: insufficient visual cues (inability to speechread when faces are obstructed or in poor lighting), background noise (difficulty communicating on planes, in restaurants, and at parties), and high-frequency sounds (women's voices, birds, and high-pitched sounds are difficult to discern even with hearing aids). Social complexities included severely limited social conversations (particularly group conversations in noisy or poorly lit settings), and four communication strategies Jain employed: augmenting (using repetitions, gestures, or technology to enhance communication), substituting (using alternative modalities like text or touchscreen kiosks), shifting (changing the conversation timing, topic, or medium), and erasure (avoiding or feigning conversations — always resulting in negative experiences). Cultural tensions included the dilemma of disability disclosure — sometimes disclosure enhanced communication, but negative reactions (excessive sympathy, patronizing behavior, discouragement from traveling alone) frequently discouraged it. Jain also navigated the tension of walking between Deaf and hearing worlds, initially struggling to communicate with Deaf travelers and later, after learning ASL, finding it challenging to readjust to the hearing world's communication demands.
Key findings
Travel magnified and transformed Jain's relationship with his hearing aids. Being far from his support network, he became "obsessed" with their safety — sleeping with them under his pillow, staying up to dry them with a hair dryer when they got wet, and panicking about battery supplies. This heightened dependence contrasts with the home environment where replacement and repair are readily available. Two technology explorations were created and tested across 18 travel events: (1) a speech-to-text translator using a collar microphone paired with an iPhone, used during flights and conversations with flight crew to access previously inaccessible announcements (70-80% transcription accuracy enabled understanding from context); and (2) a "topic moderator" using a portable speaker connected to the phone, where Jain pre-loaded contextual conversation quotes and played them during car rides to prompt social conversations without having to disclose his hearing loss upfront. The speech-to-text exploration shifted Jain's strategy from erasure (avoiding conversation) to substitution (using text), while the topic moderator shifted from erasure to augmentation (using contextual cues to support conversation). Both also benefited hearing companions — co-passengers used the speech-to-text to discern announcements they couldn't hear either, and family members became more aware of communication needs after seeing the technology. The paper also provides methodological guidelines for first-person disability research, emphasizing its value for generating intimate insights unavailable through traditional participant studies, while noting challenges around privacy, power dynamics between disabled graduate students and advisors, and the balance between disclosure and self-protection.
Relevance
This paper makes both substantive and methodological contributions to accessibility research. Substantively, it reveals the compounding, situated, and deeply personal ways that hearing loss affects travel — a domain where communication barriers are amplified by unfamiliar environments, languages, cultures, and the absence of one's usual support network. The four communication strategies (augment, substitute, shift, erase) provide a useful framework for understanding how DHH people navigate different situations, and the finding that erasure always leads to negative experiences argues strongly for technologies and social environments that support the other three strategies. The disability disclosure dilemma — where revealing hearing loss sometimes helps but frequently triggers stigmatizing responses — highlights that accessibility barriers are social and cultural, not just technical. For accessibility practitioners, the technology explorations demonstrate that effective assistive solutions for travel need not be purpose-built expensive devices; repurposing commercial technologies (iPhone, Siri, portable speakers) in creative ways can address real needs. The autoethnographic method itself is advocated as a valuable complement to traditional accessibility research, capable of revealing emotional, personal, and longitudinal insights that participant studies cannot capture. The paper's call for more disabled researchers to contribute first-person accounts reflects a broader push toward centering the lived experience of disability in accessibility research.
Tags: hard of hearing · Deaf and hard of hearing · autoethnography · accessible tourism · disability disclosure · assistive technology · hearing aid · communication strategies · personalized technology · travel accessibility · first-person research